Rosalind o hanlon

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Modern Asian Studies 44, 2 (2010) pp. 201–240. C© Cambridge University Press 2009

doi:10.1017/S0026749X09990229 First published online 28 September 2009

Letters Home:Banaras pandits and the Maratha regions

in early modern India∗

ROSALIND O’HANLON

Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2LE, UKEmail: [email protected]

Abstract

Maratha Brahman families migrated to Banaras in increasing numbers fromthe early sixteenth century. They dominated the intellectual life of the city andestablished an important presence at the Mughal and other north Indian courts.They retained close links with Brahmans back in the Maratha regions, wherepressures of social change and competition for rural resources led to acrimoniousdisputes concerning ritual entitlement and precedence in the rural social order.Parties on either side appealed to Banaras for resolution of the disputes, raisingserious questions about the nature of Brahman community and identity. Banaraspandit communities struggled to contain these disputes, even as the symbols oftheir own authority came under attack from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Bythe early eighteenth century, the emergence of the Maratha state created newmodels of Brahman authority and community, and new patterns for the resolutionof such disputes.

IntroductionThe development of the city of Banaras in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries exemplifies the growing ‘connectedness’ thathistorians have taken to define the ‘early modern’ in South Asia.1

∗ I am extremely grateful to fellow participants in a workshop in Oxford in May2007, on the subject of ‘Ideas in circulation in early modern India’. I particularlythank Christopher Minkowski for sharing his insights and expertise, and AllisonBusch, Sheldon Pollock and James Benson for their comments on this draft. MadhavDeshpande and Shailendra Bhandare kindly shared important source materials withme. I thank Madhav Bhole and Ramesh Nimbkar for assistance in tracing the historiesof some of the sources used in this paper.

1 For this theme, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towardsa Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 31, 3, 1997,

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The consolidation from the early sixteenth century of successor statesto the Bahmani and Vijayanagar kingdoms meant a proliferation oflarge and smaller courtly centres in southern and central India withpatronage to offer.2 In the north, the decade of the 1570s saw theconsolidation of Akbar’s state and the emergence of an expansive newMughal cultural strategy, drawing in the ambitious and talented fromdifferent regional and religious traditions and promoting exchangebetween them.3 Set between these northern and southern networks,Banaras seems to have attracted a new wave of intellectual specialistsin the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading intellectualsfrom these pandit communities led significant innovations in Sanskritlearning.4 Many worked across a range of different fields rather thanproducing commentaries embedded ever more deeply in individualdisciplines. Compendia and digests, often commissioned by royalpatrons and seemingly aimed at non-specialist audiences, becamecommoner as literary forms. The ritual entitlements of people furtherdown the social scale seemed to attract attention in a new way.5 Somewriters adopted a stronger temporal sense in their ordering of the

pp. 735–762. For Benaras, see A.S. Altekar, History of Banaras (Banaras: CulturePublication House, 1937); Diana L. Eck, Banaras, Lity of Light (London: Routledgeand Kegan Paul, 1983); Eck, ‘Kashi, city and symbol’, in Purana, Vol. 20, 2, 1978, pp.169–92; and Eck, ‘A survey of the Sanskrit sources for the study of Banaras’, Purana,Vol. 22, 1, 1980, pp. 81–101.

2 See Richard M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 59–128; and Velcheru NarayanaRao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and Statein Nayaka Period Tamilnadu (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1992).

3 Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India Before Europe (Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 126–44.

4 Sheldon B. Pollock, ‘New Intellectuals in Seventeenth Century India’, in The IndianEconomic and Social History Review, Vol. 38 (1), 2001, pp. 3–31; and Pollock, The Languageof the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2006); Yigal Bronner, ‘What is New and What isNavya: Sanskrit Poetics on the Eve of Colonialism’, in Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol.30, 5, October 2002, pp. 441–62; Lawrence McRea, ‘Novelty of Form and Noveltyof Substance in Seventeenth Century Mımam. sa’, in Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol.30, 5, October 2002, pp. 481–494; Johannes Bronkhorst, ‘Bhat.t.oji Dıks.ita on Sphot.a’,in Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 33, 2005, pp. 3–41; and Christopher Minkowski,‘Astronomers and their Reasons’, in Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 30, 2002, pp.495–514.

5 See, for example, the Sudrakamalakara of Kamalakara Bhatta, and the slightlyearlier Sudracarasiroman. i of Sesa Krsna, both prominent ‘southern’ pandits. AnanyaVajpeyi, ‘Excavating Identity through Tradition: Who was Sivaji?’ in Satish Saberwaland Supriya Varma (eds.), Traditions in Motion: Religion and Society in History (Delhi:Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 257–258.



B A N A R A S P A N D I T S A N D T H E M A R A T H A R E G I O N S 203

knowledges of the past, alongside a new flourishing in the disciplineof mımam. sa in this period, whose foundations lay in inferring thenature of dharma from ‘eternal’ Vedic revelation.6 The doctrine ofkasimaran. amukti was developed in new and stronger forms, suggestingthat Banaras, as the city of Siva, held out possibilities of liberation tothe departing soul as powerful as any that a virtuous life lived in theworld could bestow.7

Also well known is the central place of ‘southern’ or daks.inatya panditsin these developments.8 Many were migrants from learned familiesin the old religious centres of the Konkan littoral, or from the shrinetowns that clustered along the Godavari, Bhima and Krishna riversas they flowed eastward across the plains of central and southernIndia.9 Several generations of the Bhatta family of Desastha Brahmansauthored major works across a range of disciplines and acted asintermediaries between the Mughal court and wider constituenciesof the Hindu pious in north India.10 The Devas, also Desasthas,were a famous family of mımam. sakas, descended from the great poetEknath (1533–1599).11 The Caturdhara or Chowdhuri family ofDesasthas established itself in Banaras when Nilakantha Caturdhara

6 For these aspects of mımam. sa, see Sheldon S. Pollock, ‘Mımam. sa and the Problemof History in Traditional India’, in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 109, 4,1989, pp. 603–610.

7 Christopher Minkowski, ‘Nılakan. t.ha Caturdhara’s Mantrakasikhan. d. a’, in Journalof the American Oriental Society, Vol. 122.2, 2002, pp. 329–344; Jonathan Parry, Deathin Banaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 26–32. ChristopherBayly has suggested that the easier conditions of travel under Mughal imperial rule,and the revenues it collected from taxes on pilgrims, boosted Banaras’s importanceas a pilgrim destination during the early modern period. C.A. Bayly, ‘From ritualto ceremony: death ritual and society in Hindu north India since 1600’, in JoachimWhaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: studies in the social history of death, (London: EuropaPress, 1981), pp. 154–86.

8 M.H. Shastri, ‘Dakshini Pandits at Benaras’, in Indian Antiquary, Vol. XLI, January1912, pp. 7–13.

9 For a description of Paithan in particular, this ‘Kasi of the South’, seeR.S. Morwanchikar, The City of the Saints: Paithan Through the Ages (Delhi: AjantaPublications, 1985). For other migrations following the fall of Vijayanagar,see Richard M. Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufis in MedievalIndia (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1996), pp. 97–99.

10 For the Bhatta family, see James Benson, ‘Sam. karabhat.t.a’s Family Chronicle’in Axel Michaels (ed.), The Pandit: Traditional Scholarship in India (Delhi: Manohar,2001), pp. 105–118. The colonial historian of Maharashtra’s Brahman communities,R.B.Gunjikar, identifies the Bhattas as Desasthas: R.B. Gunjikar, Sarasvatı Man. d. ala(Bombay: Nirnayasagar Press, 1884), p. 99.

11 For a history of the Deva family, see P.K. Gode, ‘Apadeva, the Author ofthe Mımam. sa-Nyayaprakasa and Mahamahopadhyaya Apadeva, the Author of theAdhikaran. acandrika—are they identical?’ in Studies in Indian Literary History (Bombay:Singhi Jain Sastra Siksapith, 1954), Vol. II, pp. 39–43.




came to the city from Kupergaon on the Godavari and establishedhimself in the latter decades of the seventeenth century as a majorcommentator on the Mahabharata.12 The Punatambakar family ofDesasthas came to the city from Punatamba on the Godavari, whereMahadeva Punatambakar emerged as a leading scholar of logic.13

Narasimha Sesa left the Sesa family home on the eastern Godaveri,spent time at the Bijapur court, and then settled in Banaras, where hisson, Krsna Sesa, emerged as a prominent scholar in the last decadesof the sixteenth century.14 The Bharadavaja family came to Banarasa little later: its founder was Mahadeva, who married the daughter ofNilakantha Bhatta, grandson of Narayana Bhatta.15

To make sense of this extraordinary intellectual and socialformation, we need to look both at the urban milieu of Banarasitself, and at the regions and localities from which many of thesepandits came. This interplay was to be vitally important. Caughtup in the rapid social transformation of this period, communities ofBrahmans back in the Maratha regions struggled to establish their ownhierarchies of inclusion and exclusion, of superior and inferior degreesof Brahmanhood. To resolve these disputes, pandit assemblies inBanaras produced nirn. ayapatras, or letters of judgement, signed by thepandits present, which were then sent back to the contending Brahmanparties. However, these attempts at adjudication were complicated.As Brahman families migrated to Banaras, they were in some cases tocarry their local rivalries and resentments with them, and to find newarenas for their expression in the intellectual life of the city. As theselocal disputes intensified during the seventeenth century, the panditcommunities of Banaras were impelled to engage in new ways withthe wider question of what it meant to be a Brahman, and to searchfor new ways of asserting and justifying Brahman authority. In thiscentury before the coming of colonialism, Brahman community andidentity were deeply conflicted constructs.

12 For a history of the Caturdhara/Chaudhuri family, see P.K. Gode,‘Nılakan. t.ha Caturdhara, The Commentator of the Mahabharata—His Genealogyand Descendants’ in Studies in Indian Literary History, Vol. II, pp. 475–498.

13 For references to the Punatambakar family, see Shastri, ‘Dakshini Pandits’; B.Upadhyaya, Kası kı panditya parampara (Banaras: Visvavidyalaya Prakasana, 1983), pp.30–31; and Pollock, ‘New Intellectuals’, pp. 8–9. For Mahadeva Punatambakar, seeT. Aufrecht, Catalogus Catalogorum (Leipzig: FA Brockhaus, 1891), Vol. 1, pp. 437a–b.(Hereafter CC.)

14 For a history of the Sesa family, see Ranganathasvami Aryavaraguru, ‘On theSheshas of Benaras’, in Indian Antiquary, Vol. XLI, November 1912, pp. 245–53.

15 For the Bharadavaja family, see Shastri, ‘Dakshini Pandits’, 1912, p. 13.




Madhav Deshpande has explored some aspects of this interplaybetween Banaras and the Maratha country.16 This paper offers acloser exploration of the pandit assemblies and their letters ofjudgement. These letters offer an unusually detailed source for thisperiod of India’s social history, providing important insights into socialprocesses not easily found in the state-centred records in Persian orMarathi of the period.17 The judgements are analysed for what theycan tell us about the degree to which Banaras pandits were drawninto the inter-Brahman disputes of the Maratha country. Some ofthe less well-known Brahman intellectuals who signed the lettersare identified, and their names compared with other lists from theperiod.18 The aim is to get a sense of what was at issue in theassemblies, both for the pandits themselves, and for the provincialBrahmans bringing disputes to Banaras for resolution. Finally, thepaper explores the elaborate procedures that the assemblies developedto emphasize the supreme authority of their judgements, even as thesymbols of Brahman intellectual authority in the city began to drawthe hostile attention of the emperor Aurangzeb. An attempt is madeto explore some of these connections, and to place them in the contextof the Maratha warrior leader Sivaji’s emergence as challenger toMughal strategy in the Deccan.

Changing environments for Brahmansin the Maratha country

Writing in 1884, R.B. Gunjikar, historian of western India’s Brahmancommunities, identified eight subcastes of Maharashtrian Brahmans:

16 Madhav M. Deshpande, ‘Localising the Universal Dharma: Puranas, Nibandhas,and Nirnayapatras in Medieval Maharashtra’, unpublished mss. These and relatedissues have been the subject of an important new study in Gijs Kruijtzer, Xenophobia inSeventeenth Century India (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2009), which came to handonly after this paper had gone to press.

17 A note on sources is appended to this paper.18 In particular the names attached to the praise addresses offered to the Banaras

pandit Kavindracaraya, presented after he persuaded the emperor Shah Jehan toabolish the tax on pilgrims to Banaras, probably in the 1630s. Har Dutt Sharmaand M.M. Patkar, Kavındracandrodaya (Pune: Oriental Book Agency, 1939). Anothercollection of praise addresses, from the time of Akbar, is the Nar.asim. hasarvasavakavyam,in honour of the pandit Narasimhasrama: see Haraprasad Shastri, A DescriptiveCatalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Government Collection under the Care of the AsiaticSociety of Bengal (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1923), Vol. 4, ‘History andGeography’, pp. 81–5. Unless otherwise stated, all identifications suggested beloware consistent with what are here understood to be the best accepted chronologicalparameters for the life of each pandit.




the Desasthas of the Deccan uplands, and the multiple smallcommunities of the Konkan littoral: Chitpavans or Chiplunas,Karhades, Senavis or Saraswats, Devarukhes, Kiravants, Padyas andPalshes.19 As might be expected, the histories of these names aredifficult to identify with certainty. Some seem to derive from townswhere there were large settlements of those subgroups, such asChiplun, Karhad, Devarukhe and Palshe. Some appear to be titlesderived from a particular mode of livelihood. Kiravants, for example,were said to be Saraswat Brahmans fallen from their high statusby taking on the ritual work of many Sudra menials, hence theirname kriyavanta or ‘possessed of many rituals’.20 Saraswat communityhistories explain the title ‘Senavi’, applied to Saraswat Brahmans whohad moved up from Goa into the Konkan, as a derivation from theSanskrit term sahana, meaning clever or learned, referring to theirclerical and scholarly pursuits.21 Desasthas were another regionalcategory. It was to this ‘utterly boundless Brahman class’, as thenineteenth-century reformer Visnu Sastri Pandit described them, towhich almost all of the southern pandit families who moved to Banarasbelonged.22

Other affiliations were important too. Besides family and lineage, allBrahmans were members of a gotra and a pravara, exogamous groupingsdefined by notional shared descent from one of the ancient sages.23

They were also defined by a sakha or Vedic affiliation, denoting theparticular branch of Vedic learning to which the community haddedicated itself. Some southern Brahmans were also identified bysectarian affiliations, as Smartas or as Madhvas, and as adherents

19 Gunjikar, Sarasvatı Man. d. ala, pp. 179–180. It is difficult to find evidence forwidespread use of the term ‘Chitpavan’ for Brahmans from Chiplun, before theseventeenth century. P.K. Gode, ‘The origin and antiquity of the caste-name of theKarahat.aka or Karhad. a Brahmins’, in Studies in Indian Cultural History (Pune: Prof. PKGode Collected Works Publication Committee, 1969), Vol. III, p. 7.

20 Gunjikar, Sarasvatı Man. d. ala, pp. 177–179. For a Chitpavan attempt to reducethe ritual entitlements of Kiravants made in the northern Konkan in March 1757,see R.V. Oturkar, Pesvekalin samajik va arthik patravyavahara (Pune: Indian Council forHistorical Research, 1950), pp. 123–124. I am extremely grateful to Sumit Guha forthis reference.

21 M.G. Sharma, Sarasvata Bhus.an. a (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1950), pp. 70–71, and P.K. Gode, ‘Antiquity of the caste name ‘Sen. avi’, in Journal of the University ofBombay, Vol. 5, no. 6, 1937, pp. 152–155.

22 Visnusastri Pandit, Devarukhyam. vıs.ayım. Sastrasam. mata Vicara (Bombay: InduPrakash Press, 1874), p. 39.

23 For these divisions, see Thomas Trautmann, Dravidian kinship (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 239–245.




therefore of one of the mat.hs or monasteries embodying that sectariantradition.24

It is difficult to know what processes of fission and fusion may haveshaped these Brahman ‘subcastes’ before the early modern period.They are likely to have involved migrations, new settlements in villagesgifted as tax-free land to Brahmans, changes of livelihood, shiftingpatterns of commensality and marriage relations, and occasions ofdharmic transgression. It seems likely too that this group of eightsubcastes, identified in the late nineteenth century, was in factmutable over time, as some split and others merged.25

Maharashtra’s most important ‘purana of place’, the Sahyadrikhan. d. a,devoted many of its chapters to explaining the origins of thedifferent Brahman subcastes.26 It offered an all-India classificationof Brahmans into two great classes. The panca gaud. a were the fiveclasses of ‘northern’ Brahmans—Saraswat, Kanyakubja, Maithila,Gauda and Utkala. Gaud. a in this setting therefore referred both tothe general grouping of Brahman communities found north of theVindhya mountain range, and to Gauda desa, the ancient countryof northeastern India. The panca dravid. a were the five classes ofsouthern Brahmans: Dravidas, Tailangas, Karnatas, Gurjuras, and the

24 For these affiliations amongst Saraswats, for example, see Frank F. Conlon,A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans 1700–1935 (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1977), pp. 20–22.

25 An 1832 survey of ‘Maharasthr’ Brahmans in Banaras reveals these multipleaffilations. It listed eleven categories, described as Dravir, Tylang, Chitpaur,Yujurbedi, Raghurbedi, Sanwai, Kan no, Prabhu, Kanhare, Karhare, and Abhir.Dravir (Dravida) Tylang (Telenga), Chitpaur (Chitpavan), Kan no (Kanoja), Kanhare(Kannada) and Karhare (Karhade) are local or regional affiliations. Sanwai isan occupational affiliation. Yujurvedi and Raghurbedi (Rgvedi) represent sakhas.‘Desastha’ does not appear here as a significant designation. James Prinsep, ‘Censusof the Population of the City of Banaras’, in Asiatic Researches, xvii, 1832, p. 491. Seealso M.A. Sherring, Tribes and Castes as Represented in Banaras (London: Trubner and Co,1872).

26 Notionally a part of the Skandapuran. a, one of the 18 ‘great’ puranas, theSahyadrikhan. d. a is a heterogeneous collection of texts, written over a very long period.The only edition is J. Gerson da Cunha, Sri Sahyadrikhan. d. a Skandapuran. a (Bombay:Nirnaya Sagar Press, 1877). Da Cunha’s edition is based on 14 manuscripts collectedfrom different parts of India and collated to produce his edition. These containreferences to the king Mayurasarma dating to 345–370 AD, to Madhavacarya ofthe 13th Century AD, while one of the manuscripts is dated 1700. See also StephanH. Levitt, ‘The Sahyadrikhan. d. a: some problems concerning a text-critical edition of aPuranic text’, in Purana, Vol. 9, 1, 1977, pp. 8–40; and Levitt, ‘Sahyadrikhan. d. a: styleand content and indices of authorship in the Patityagramanirn. aya’, in Purana, Vol. 24,1, 1982, pp. 128–145.




inhabitants of ‘Madhyadesa’, or ‘Maharastra’ in some variant readingsof these lists.27

More locally, the texts of the Sahyadrikhan. d. a describe how the sageParasurama wrested the lands of the Konkan littoral from the sea,and then set about populating these lands with their many differentBrahman communities. Some, like the Chitpavans and Saraswats,were described as migrants into the region.28 Karhades, Padyas andothers were represented as fallen Brahmans inhabiting wicked lands.29

A sub-set of central chapters, the Patityagramanirn. aya or ‘determinationof fallen villages’ deal with subgroups of Brahmans who had come intobeing through fission, changes of occupation, sin or dharmic lapse.30

The texts contain many names of Brahman subgroups no longer inexistence by the time Gunjikar compiled his list in 1884.

Deshpande has suggested that the panca gaud. a and pancadravid. a classifications encapsulate the early struggles of Brahmanintellectuals to maintain systems of social classification and ranking assome communities began to settle in new regions south of the Vindhyamountains.31 For migrants, the chance to shape more local narrativesof community origin may have offered a means of defence againstthe hostility of local Brahman communities towards outsiders.32 Thehistories of the Patityagramanirn. aya are likely to reflect social strainswithin villages originally settled by Brahman families, or given astax-free land, and may point to the origin of some of the Konkan’sBrahman subcastes in particular village settlements.

If the older puranic accounts suggest elements of strain and strugglein the shaping of Brahman subgroups and communities, the earlymodern period was to bring its own new elements of turbulence. First,

27 Da Cunha, Sri Sahyadrikhan. d. a, uttararadha, adhyaya 1, vss. 2–4 and MadhavM. Deshpande, ‘Panca Gaud. a und Panca Dravid. a. Umstrittene Grenzen einertraditionellen Klassifikation’ in M. Bergunder and R.P. Das, (eds), ‘Arier’ und ‘Draviden’,Konstruktionen der Vergangenheit als Grundlage fur Selbst-und Fremdwahrnehmungen Sudasiens(Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2002), pp. 57–78.

28 Da Cunha, Sri Sahyadrikhan. d. a, uttararadha, adhyaya 1, ‘Origins of theChitpavans’, vss. 39–45.

29 Ibid., adhyaya 2, ‘Origins of the Karastras’, vss. 1–8, and 16–20, and adhyaya20, vs. 24.

30 Stephan H. Levitt ‘The Patityagramanirn. aya: A Puranic History of DegradedBrahman Villages’, University of Pennsylvania Dissertation, 1974, pp. 175–289.

31 Deshpande, ‘Panca Gaud. a’, pp. 74–75.32 Paul Axelrod and Michelle A. Fuerch. ‘Portugese Orientalism and the making

of the village communities of Goa’ in Ethnohistory, Vol. 45, 3, 1998, pp. 439–476; andAxelrod and Fuerch, ‘Flight of the Deities: Hindu Resistance in Portugese Goa’, inModern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, 2, 1996, pp. 387–421.




as Fukazawa, Richards and others have demonstrated, the states ofthe Deccan Sultanate drew many local Hindu scribal specialists intostate service. The Bijapur court in particular took steps to establishthe office of desakulkarni, or accountant, as an independent office.Brahman families came to hold most of these hereditary posts as theytook clearer shape over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. This gave rise to powerful new classes of Brahman ‘men ofthe pen’ in the bureaucracies of the Deccan sultanate states, whobecame indispensable in courts and great households as much asin their local roles as village accountants responsible for revenueassessment and collection.33

Second, as Frank Perlin has argued, the Maratha countryside sawthe consolidation of wealth and prestige into the hands of particularfamilies, well before the eighteenth-century growth of Brahmanfinancial power under the government of the Peshwas. Some familieswere able to build up scattered accumulations of offices and rightsas village and regional heads, accountants and holders of militaryestates.34 Brahman families as well as Marathas accumulated rightsin this way, deploying their combination of scribal skills, religiousprestige and access to cash to assemble substantial holdings in landand local office, as well as developing widespread credit operations.35 Inthe Konkan littoral, khoti tenures were offered as a form of hereditablerevenue farm, granted as an incentive to boost cultivation particularlyafter periods of drought and dearth. Chitpavan Brahmans in the

33 Hiroshi Fukazawa, ‘The local administration of the Adilshahi Sultanate (1484–1686)’ in Fukazawa, The Medieval Deccan: Peasants, Social Systems and States (Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 1–48; J.F. Richards, Mughal administration inGolconda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan;Andre Wink, Land and sovereignty in India: agrarian society and politics under the eighteenth-century Maratha Svarajya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 296–304; Gijs Kruijtzer, ‘Madanna, Akkanna and the Brahmin Revolution: A Study ofMentality, Group Behaviour and Personality in Seventeenth Century India’, in Journalof the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 54, 2, 2002, pp. 231–67. For anindispensable account of the growth of Brahman power in the eighteenth century, seeSusan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 64–96.

34 Frank Perlin, ‘Of White Whale and Countrymen in the Eighteenth CenturyMaratha Deccan: Extended Class Relations, Rights and the problem of RuralAutonomy in the eighteenth Century Maratha Deccan’, in Journal of Peasant Studies,Vol. 5, 1978, pp. 172–237; and Perlin, ‘The Pre-Colonial Indian State in History andEpistemology: A Reconstruction of Societal Formation in the Western Deccan fromthe Fifteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century’ in H.J.M. Claessen and P. Skalnik(eds), The Study of the State (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), pp. 275–302.

35 Perlin, ‘Of White Whale and Countrymen’, p. 198.




Konkan held khoti rights at least as early as the seventeenth century,while ‘Javal’, the name of a subcommunity of Brahmans in the southernKonkan, was simply another term for a khoti landlord.36 Brahmanfamilies granted revenue-exempt lands in return for their religiousservices found that their combination of piety and access to cash gavethem formidable strength as providers of credit.37 These developmentscertainly disturbed some contemporaries: the Marathi poet Tukaram,for example, complained that the Brahmans were deserting theirolder roles as priests and village servants, to take up profitable newoccupations as revenue farmers and moneylenders.38

Third, Brahman migration into the Konkan littoral in particularcontinued and intensified. SuklaYajurvediya community historiesdocument their migration to the Konkan from the Paithan andPunatamba districts on the Godavari. Ramadevaraya of Devagiri(1271–1309) recruited local Desastha families to serve his son asritual officiants in the Konkan, where they were granted valuable landsand offices. From the late-seventeenth century, however, Chitpavansattacked them as a species of local and inferior Brahman, ‘Palshes’from the town of Palshi where many lived, denying their identity asrespectable Desasthas of the Yajurvedi sakha.39 The arrival of thePortuguese in the Konkan from the 1520s resulted in a substantialdisplacement of Brahmans from Goa into the Konkan and Deccan.There are also seventeenth-century complaints against Karhades asinterlopers from above the ghats seeking to appropriate local rightsand livelihoods.40

36 James Molesworth, Marathi-English Dictionary (Bombay: Bombay EducationSociety’s Press, 1857), p. 216. See Gode, ‘The Origin and Antiquity’, p. 9, for adocument of 5 April 1676 referring to a Chitpavan khot. The family of the Chitpavannationalist leader Tilak had for three centuries been khoti landlords in the Ratnagirivillage of Chikhalgaon. D.V. Tahmankar, Lokamanya Tilak: Father of Indian Unrest andMaker of Modern India (London: J. Murray, 1956), p. 7. See also A.R. Kulkarni, MedievalMaharashtra (New Delhi: Books and Books, 1996), pp. 162–72.

37 In 1705, for example, the Dev family of Cincvad near Pune were supplying cash tothe Maratha ruler Shahu, who was being held hostage at Aurangzeb’s court. LaurenceW. Preston, The Devs of Cincvad. A Lineage and the State in Maharashtra (Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 51–52.

38 Tukaram Tatya Padaval, Samagra Tukaram Gatha (Pune: Varada Press, 1996),Vol. II, nos. 6163–6166. For other observations about Maratha Brahmans andservice, see Surendra Nath Sastri (ed.), Visvagun. adarsacampu of Venkatadhvari (Varanasi:Vidyabhavana Sanskrit Series, 1963), pp. 111–117.

39 Gunjikar, Sarasvatı Man. d. ala, pp. 82–91; Narayana Vitthal Vaidya, Abhiprayaval.ı(Bombay: Nirnayasagar Press, 1885).

40 Gode, ‘Origin and Antiquity’, p. 13.




Disputed entitlements:Saraswats and Devarukhes

These social shifts emerge in a particularly marked way in thehistories of two Brahman subgroups. Saraswats constituted one of thegroups of northern or gaud. a Brahmans, both their own internal castehistories and the narratives of the Sahyadrikhan. d. a describing themas having migrated to Goa at an early date. Their status as villageheads and controllers of temple resources enabled them to establishthemselves both as political intermediaries and important revenuecontractors under the Portugese. Portugese religious pressures,particularly the destruction in 1564 of their important mat.h, ormonastery, at Kusasthal in Goa, drove many to migrate northwardsinto the Konkan and south into the Kanara regions. The gurusof the Kusasthal mat.h also left Goa, settling first in the Konkanand then, from about 1600, in Banaras.41 Known as Senavis in theKonkan, contemporary accounts record their pervasive presence andsuccess as educators, administrators and political intermediaries.42

They were also important traders. In a document of 24 October 1643

recording local revenue rights, we find Lakha Senavi, Badul Senavi,Narayan Senavi and Raghunath Senavi mentioned as merchants fromRevadandha, who had set up warehouses to trade in every differentkind of commodity between the Konkan and the passes into theDeccan.43 The term ‘Senavi’ applied to the families from particularlyprestigious Saraswat settlements in Goa, and seems to have beengeneralised in the Konkan to apply to all Brahmans from Goa. Theterm ‘Saraswat’, with its overt associations with the five groups ofgaud. a, or ‘northern’ Brahmans, came only slowly into practical use forthese Konkani Brahmans from the middle of the eighteenth century.44

Devarukhes were also Konkani Brahmans whose nomenclaturewas complex. Gunjikar’s 1884 account observed, ‘some say that

41 Sharma, Sarasvata Bhus.an. a, p.189.42 See Rosalind O’Hanlon and Christopher Minkowski, ‘What makes people

who they are? Pandit Networks and the Problem of Livelihoods in Early ModernWestern India’ in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 45, 3, 2008, pp.381–416.

43 SV Avalaskar, Konkanaca Itihasacı Sadhanem. (Pune: Bharata Itihasa Sam. sodhakaMan. d. ala Sviya Granthamala, 1953), pp. 2–5.

44 N.K. Wagle, ‘The History and Social Organisation of the Gauda SaraswataBrahmanas of the West Coast of India’, in Journal of Indian History, Vol. 48, 1, 1970,pp. 8–25, and Vol. 48, 2, 1970, pp. 295–333, and Deshpande, ‘Panca Gaud. a’, p. 69.




“Devarukhe” is a corruption of the word ‘Devarsi’; but there is a verywell known town called Devarukhe, so there can be no doubt that theirname came about from that’.45

A number of different sources refer to an early dispute betweenDevarukhe and Chitpavan Brahmans. The Sataprasnakalpalata, a mixedpurana and local chronicle by one Madhav, who dated his manuscriptto 1690, described it in detail. Some two hundred years earlier, awealthy Chitpavan Brahman, Vasudeva Citale, was overseeing thedigging of a tank near Vasai in the Thane district of northern Konkan,and pressing local people into serving as labourers in the project. Agroup of Brahmans from the town of Devarukhe were travelling alongthe road past the tank. They refused the Chitpavan’s pressure to joinin the work unless he was willing to get his hands dirty along with theother labourers. The infuriated Chitpavan cursed the whole Brahmancommunity of Devarukhe, since which time other Konkani Brahmanshad withdrawn from social relations with them, regarding associationwith them as unlucky.46 A judicial case of 1723 alludes to this sameepisode.47

This history drew the interest of colonial commentators. Onthe evidence of their gotras or exogamous subgroups, the socialcommentator and reformer Vishnu Sastri Pandit argued in 1874 thatthe Devarukhes must originally have been part of the larger DesasthaBrahman community. He cited many contemporary examples ofintermarriage between Devarukhes and Desasthas, although alwayson the principle of the upward movement of brides: Devarukhesmarried their daughters to Desasthas, but not vice-versa.48 Herecounted the history of Vasudeva Citale’s attempt to make theDevarukhes work, and offered the theory that Devarukhes wereoriginally Desastha Brahmans who had moved into the Konkan insearch of local offices as khoti revenue farmers. Local Chitpavans hadseen them as rivals and endeavoured to turn them into labourerson their own lands, stigmatising them when the Devarukhes refusedto work.49 The Bombay Gazetteer for Ratnagiri district remarked

45 Gunjikar, Sarasvatı Man. d. ala, p. 176.46 Madhava, Sataprasnakalpalata, P.M. Joshi Collection, Bhandarkar Oriental

Research Institute, mss 19, ff. pp. 16–18.47 V.K. Rajwade, ‘Devarukyaci Mulotpatti’ in Bharata Itihasa Sam. sodhaka Man. d. ala,

1914, reprinted in M.B. Saha, Itihasacaraya VK Rajavad. e Samagraha Sahitya (Dhulia:Rajwade Samsodhana Mandala, 1998), Vol. 7, pp. 186–94.

48 Pandit, Devarukhyam. vıs.ayım. Sastrasam. mata Vicara, pp. 39–41.49 Ibid., p. 18.




that ‘they are said to have originally come to these parts as revenuefarmers’.50

The judgements coming out of Banaras always use the term ‘devars.i’for these Konkani Brahmans. How did this slippage come about?Northern dialects render the Marathi consonant ‘s.’ as ‘kh’. Thus‘devars.e’ in northern India would have been pronounced ‘devarakhe’.51

‘Devars.is’ feature in the Sahyadrikhan. d. a as stray references withinits lists of the many different categories of Brahmans.52 It is alsopossible that Devarukhes in Banaras at this time may have takenadvantage of the pious associations of the term ‘devars.i’ in its Sanskritmeaning of ‘godly sage’, to make the slippage from ‘devars.e’, the localpronunciation of ‘devarukhe’, to ‘devars.i’.53

What kinds of local mechanism would have been available inthe Maratha country to deal with uncertainties of identity andentitlement of this kind? Within the Marathi speaking regions, thelocal dharmasabha, composed of local learned Brahmans and religiousoffice-holders, had a very long history as arbiters of customaryritual practice and entitlement through letters of judgement of thekind under discussion here.54 It formed part of an array of localassemblies with different powers and purposes.55 These institutionsconsidered local rights and precedents. It seems to have been themore fundamental questions about the place of Brahman subgroupswithin the larger classification of Brahmans, which were referred tothe southern pandit assemblies of Banaras.

50 Bombay Gazetteer, Vol. X, Ratnagiri and Savantvadi (Bombay: GovernmentCentral Press, 1880), p. 114.

51 I am very grateful to Sumit Guha for pointing out this link.52 Da Cunha, Sri Sahyadrikhan. d. a, uttararadha, adhyaya 5, ‘Consideration of

Brahmans’, pp. 6–12.53 Prinsep’s survey of 1832 does not mention ‘Devarsis’ or Devarukhes. Like

Desasthas, they may have been represented under their sakha affiliation, or theymay by this period no longer have been a significant presence in Banaras. Prinsep,Census, p. 491.

54 For these assemblies, see Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Narratives of Penance andPurification in Western India, c. 1650–1850’ in The Journal of Hindu Studies, Vol. 2,2009, pp. 48–75. For the correspondence of the Prabhu dharmadhikarıs of Nasik,see D.V. Potdar and G.N. Muzumdar, Sivacaritra Sahitya, Bharata Itihasa Sam. sodhakaMan. d. ala Svıya Granthamala, No. 33, Vol. 2, (Pune: BISM, 1930), pp. 285–317; and forthe Gijare dharmadhikarıs of Karhad, see B.V. Bhat, ‘Acara, vyavahara, prayascitta’, inBharata Itihasa Sam. sodhaka Man. d. ala Quarterly, Vol. XIII, 3, December 1932, pp. 91–105.

55 For other assemblies with judicial roles, the majlis, gotasabha and jatisabha, seeV.T. Gune, The Judicial System of the Marathas (Pune: Sangam Press, 1953), pp. 65–66,110.




The ‘southern’ Brahman community in Banaras

What might the ‘southern’ pandits, who formed the majority of thosesitting in the assemblies, have shared in common? The evidencesuggests multiple and overlapping affiliations. One lay in vernacularlanguage. For the majority this was Marathi, although some wouldhave had Konkani or its local variants, and others, Telugu or Kannada.Another lay in Brahman subcaste. Some Brahman communities—Karhades, Chitpavans, Devarukhes—clearly came from towns ofthose names in Marathi or Konkani-speaking regions. This affiliationwas much less straightforward in the case of Desasthas. Brahmanmigrations from the Deccan into central and southern India produceda substantial community of Kannada-speaking Desastha Brahmans,some of whom wrote in Marathi but actually spoke Kannada, orwrote Kannada using the Marathi balbodha script.56 These migrationsexplain Prinsep’s 1832 listing described above, which includedDravida, Telanga and Kannada amongst its categories of MaharashtraBrahmans.

Another affiliation may have been with the Godavari river itself,the ‘Ganga of the south’. As Anne Feldhaus has described, longestablished elements in regional religious culture, expressed in theGodavari Mahatmya in particular, identified the river itself as a greatbody, homologous to other great bodies in the cosmos, whose ‘limbs’were represented by towns near major tirthas, such as Tryambakesvar,Punatamba, Paithan and others further east along the river inAndhra Pradesh. Brahmans living in or hailing from these towns mayhave been aware of themselves as sharing this sacred geography.57

Intellectually too, the ‘southern’ schools of Brahmans seem to haveconstituted in some ways a recognised set of intellectual positions,particularly when juxtaposed to those of ‘eastern’ India.58 ‘Easterners’had their strong base in the discipline of nyaya or logic, pursued in thescholarly communities of Mithila and then of Navadvipa and in the

56 Gunjikar, Sarasvatı Man. d. ala, pp. 104–106. Most of these Brahmans are likely tohave been Desasthas.

57 Anne Feldhaus, ‘Religious Geography and the Multiplicity of Regions inMaharashtra’, in Rajendra Vorah and Anne Feldhaus, Region, Culture and Politics inIndia (New Delhi: Manohar, 2006), pp. 194–195. See also Feldhaus, Connected Places:Region, Pilgrimage and Geographical Imagination in India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,2003), For Banaras itself as both a microcosm of the universe and a macrocosm ofthe human body, see Parry, Death in Banaras, pp. 30–31.

58 Deshpande, ‘Panca Gaud. a’, p. 57.




literary and poetic style identified with the Gauda region, also knownas pracya or ‘eastern’.59 The strengths of the southern pandits lay inmımam. sa, grammar and in dharmasastra.

A late seventeenth-century primer used to teach simpleconversational Sanskrit may give, through its fictionalised account, aglimpse into the way in which contemporaries employed some of theseoverlapping categories. It depicted a Maratha Brahman householderof Banaras who seeks out a sannyasi from the mat.h where sannyasisstayed in Banaras, and invites him to dine. The sannyasi first enquireswhat his caste is. The householder replies that he is a MaharashtrianBrahman, although both he and his father before him had actuallybeen born in ‘Gauda desa’, having gone there for an education inlogic. Hearing that he is a Maharashtrian Brahman, the sannyasi sayshe will be very glad to come. The two men then survey the duracaraor evil practices that may lie in wait for the unwary in different partsof India, and they discuss India’s regions very much in terms of thepanca gaud. a and panca dravid. a groupings of Brahmans.60

‘Southern’ pandits in sixteenth and seventeenth century Banaraswere members of wider family networks, often with pre-existingtraditions of learning. Mahadeva Punatambekara, for example, whocompleted his vast treatise on logic in 1646, had settled in Banaras, buthis father still lived back in Punatamba on the Godavari.61 NilakanthaCaturdhara left Kopargaon on the Godavari for Banaras, where hisson Govinda also resided; but his grandson Siva Chowdhuri was backin Paithan when he composed his work on dharmasastra in 1746.62

59 Satischandra Vidyabhusana, A History of Indian Logic (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas,1971), pp. 521–527. For the poetic style associated with the Gauda region, see Pollock,Language of the Gods, pp. 210–212.

60 P.K. Gode, ‘An Echo of the Seige of Jinji in a Sanskrit Grammatical Work(Between AD 1690 and 1710)’ in Studies in Indian Literary History (Pune: Prof. PKGode Collected Works Publication Committee, 1965), Vol. III, pp. 161–162. TheGırvan. apadamanjarı of Dhundiraja was an imitation of an earlier work written in thefirst half of the seventeenth century by Varadaraja, pupil of Bhattoji Diksita. In thisearlier work, the Brahman householder identifies himself as a Kanyakubja Brahman:P.K. Gode, ‘Some Provincial Customs and Manners Mentioned as Duracaras byVaradaraja (A Pupil of Bhat.t.oji Dıks.ita ca. 1600–1660)’ in Studies in Indian CulturalHistory (Pune: Prof. PK Gode Collected Works Publication Committee, 1969), Vol.III, p. 74. For a further discussion of regionalism in Sanskrit literary genres in thisperiod, see Yigal Bronner and David Shulman, ‘A Cloud Turned Goose: Sanskrit inthe Vernacular Millenium’, in Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 43, 1,2006, pp. 1–30.

61 Pollock, ‘New Intellectuals’, p. 8.62 Gode, ‘Nılakan. t.ha Caturdhara’, pp. 480–485.




Paramananda Kavindra, later to be ‘court poet’ of the Maratha leaderSivaji, came from Nevasa on the Godavari. He spent the decades ofthe mid-seventeenth century in Banaras, where he was a close friendof Gagabhatta of the Bhatta family. By 1674, he had taken up hisposition at the Maratha court in Raigad and was present at Sivaji’sconsecration in 1674.63

This sense of connection with family and locality is evident in thelives of less well-known pandits too. Narasimha was the son of afamily of Chitpavan astrologers and mathematicians from Palshetin the Konkan, whose father, Kesava, was learned in mathematics.Narasimha moved to Banaras during Akbar’s time, and receivedhonours from the emperor for his accomplishments as an astrologer.His son Raghunath described the family’s Konkani origins:

In the daksina desa there is a most happy town called Palshet, an arrow’s flightfrom the port of Dabhol, where Laksmi as well as Saraswati have made theirhomes. In that town lived a Brahman named Kesava, learned in mathematics,of the sandilya gotra, who was an ornament to the line of the Chitpavans,honoured by Parasurama.64

These few lines were a triumph of condensed reference. Theyevoked the wealth of the Konkan and the reputation of its townsfor learning, the association of Chitpavans with the god Parasurama,and even, with the reference to an arrow, of the story of Parasurama’swinning from the sea lands as far as the bow from his arrow wouldcarry.65 Other connections with the Marathi-speaking regions lay inpatronage. Mudhoji Vangoji Nimbalkar of the Naik-Nimbalkar rulersof Phaltan, family of the wife of Sivaji, issued a letter in October 1614

granting a village to the learned Brahman Bhattacharya Gosavi fromNevasa on the Godavari so that he could reside in Banaras and carryout a daily routine of bathing, praying and listening to recitations ofthe puranas.66

63 G.S. Sardesai (ed.), Paramanandakavya (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1952), pp.13–14.

64 P.V. Kane, ‘Kasıks.etratıla akbarakalına konkan. astha gharan. e’, in Bharata ItihasaSam. sodhaka Man. d. ala Quarterly, Vol. VII, nos. 11–4, 1926–7, pp. 4–5. See also DavidPingree, Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit (Philadelphia: American PhilosophicalSociety, 1970–1994), Vol. 5, p. 374.

65 For another Chitpavan in Banaras who was careful to mention his family andsubcaste, see P.K. Gode, ‘Visvanatha Mahadeva Ranad. e, A Cittapavan Court-Poet ofRaja Ramsing I of Jaipur And His Works—Between AD 1650 and 1700’, in Studies inIndian Literary History, Vol. II, pp. 258–273.

66 G.S. Sardesai (ed.), Selections from the Peshwa Daftar (Bombay: Government CentralPress, 1934), Vol. 31, pp. 4–5.




Banaras also seems to have had a substantial transient populationof Maratha Brahmans. Many came for education, often for extendedperiods.67 Maratha Brahman pilgrims might stay for a long period.We gain insights into these histories, particularly when prolongedstays in Banaras could cause trouble back home. The GolavalikaraPadhye family of Karhade Brahmans from the Konkan brought a courtcase in 1600 against another local family, the Purohitas, allegingthat the latter had tried to move in on their priestly offices whilePadhye family members had been away on a mahayatra, a greatpilgrimage to Banaras and other holy cities, which had lasted for nineyears.68

Authority and the Visvesvara temple

It was from the 1570s that the southern pandit community cameto prominence in Banaras, under the leadership of Narayana of theBhatta family.69 Well-known stories emphasize his advocacy of theintellectual positions of ‘southern’ Brahmans, as well as his role asprotagonist for the larger community of Hindu pious. Some of thesestories are well documented. The family history written by Narayana’ssecond son, Samkara, describes how the lord of Utkala in Orissa invitedhim to debate with pandits from the ‘eastern’ schools. After a month,he established the supremacy of the southern schools.70 At the houseof Todar Mal in Delhi, he debated with eminent pandits from Gauda

67 Visiting Banaras in the 1660s, the traveller Bernier was told that students stayedwith their teachers for ten to twelve years. Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire,AD 1565–1668 (London: H. Milford, 1914), pp. 334–335. This may equally reflectclassical conventions about the period of Vedic studentship proper to young Brahmans:F.E. Keay, Indian Education in Ancient and Later Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1938), p. 30.

68 This family was later to produce the eminent dharmasastri KasinathaUpadhyaya, who completed his famous digest the Dharmasindhu in 1790, in which hestated clearly at the start of the work was aimed at a lay rather than a scholarlyaudience. Kasinatha Upadhyaya, Dharmasindhu (Banaras: Chowkhamba SanskritSeries Office, 1968), pp. 1–2; P.V. Kane, History of Dharmasastra (Pune: BhandarkarOriental Research Institute, 1975), Vol. 1, pp. 463–465; and Potdar and Muzumdar,Sivacaritra Sahitya, Vol. 2, pp. 333–353.

69 Richard Salomon, ‘Biographical Data on Narayan. a Bhat.t.a of Benaras’ inSamaresh Bandhopadhyay, Acarya-Vandana: D.R. Bhandarkar Birth Centenary Volume(Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1982), pp. 326–336.

70 Benson, ‘Sam. karabhat.t.a’s Family Chronicle’, p. 112.




and Mithila, with Vidyanivasa, the leading pandit at Navadvipa, attheir head.71

The most celebrated episode of Narayana’s life, attested by a numberof different sources, was his involvement, probably during the 1580s,in the rebuilding of Banaras’s great temple to Siva as Visvesvara, ‘Lordof All’, and the reinstallation of its great Siva linga.72 The Visvesvaratemple was one of the most important sacred sites in this city ofmaran. amukti, where Siva’s teachings, whispered into the ear of thedying, brought certain liberation to the soul. There is much solidevidence of Narayana’s close interest in the temple. His Tristhalısetu,‘Bridge to the Three Holy Cities’, offered in convenient and compactform a guide to the spiritual merits that pilgrims to the holy citiesof Banaras, Gaya and Prayag could accrue in different sacred placesin these cities. The long central section of the guide, dealing withBanaras, suggests that the temple was at one point in some state ofdilapidation, since Narayana explains that pilgrims might well findempty shrines when they visited it, ‘owing to the bad actions of themlecchas’.73

Narayana’s involvement naturally raises the wider question as tothe ‘southern’ pandits’ role in developing the stronger claims for theunique spiritual powers of Banaras, and of the Visvesvara temple itselfas their centre and sacred source. These claims were already set outin the Kasikhan. d. a, the most important of the puranic texts celebratingthe virtues of the city, probably compiled in the fourteenth centuryout of earlier texts and traditions.74 In Siva’s praise poem of Banaras,spoken on his return to the city after a long exile, he celebrates theVisvesvara linga as the linga of lingas, the force behind all otherlingas in the world, the lingas of Banaras themselves standing, in agreat cosmic homology, for other lingas all over India.75 Narayana’sown work included a selection and arrangement of passages from theKasikhan. d. a.

71 Shastri, ‘Dakshini Pandits’, p. 10.72 Salomon, ‘Biographical Data’, pp. 333–334.73 R. Gokhale and H.N. Apte (eds), Narayan. abhat.t.aviracitah. Tristhalısetuh. (Banaras:

Anand Asram Press, 1915), p. 208. See also Richard Salomon, The Bridge to the ThreeHoly Cities. The Samanya-praghattaka of Narayana Bhatta’s Tristhalısetu (Delhi: MotilalBanarsidas, 1985).

74 This question is discussed in Minkowski, ‘Nılakan. t.ha Caturdhara’sMantrakasikhan. d. a’, pp. 336–337.

75 Kasikhan. d. a (Banaras: no press given, 1908), adhyaya 99, ‘The mahatmya of theVisvesvaralinga’.




As we shall see below, the pandit assemblies were emphatic in theiremphasis that their meetings took place in the Mukti mandapam or‘Mukti pavilion’ of the Visvesvara temple. Was this a poetic referenceto an imagined space, or a physical location? Questions of this kindare notoriously difficult to answer for Banaras. We do have a goodidea of the temple’s structure at the point at which the emperorAurangzeb ordered its destruction in 1669, because the mosque thenbuilt on the site retained the basic ground plan of the temple.76 It hada central square sanctuary housing the linga of Visvesvara, measuring32 ft on each side. Each side of the square led to an antechambermeasuring 16 ft by 10 ft and leading from these antechambers werefour mandapams, or pavilions, each measuring 16 ft by 16 ft.

The Kasikhan. d. a describes the Mukti, Srngara, Aisvarya and Jnanamandapams, to the south, east, north and west respectively of thecentral sanctuary housing the Siva linga.77 Narayana’s own work theTristhalısetu makes it even clearer that these were physical spaces, withthe Mukti mandapam having special significance. Drawing on selectedpassages from the Kasikhan. d. a, he highlights the special merit conferredby recitation and study of the Vedas, dharmasastras, puranas andhistories in the Mukti mandapam. These passages suggest that theMukti mandapam was at the time of the Kasikhan. d. a’s writing alreadyassociated with discussions in matters of law. Narayana quotes fromthe Kasikhan. d. a: ‘Because one can worship in the Mukti mandapam,and converse on matters of law there, as well as listen to the Puranas,a man who is a receptacle of dharma should live in Kasi.’78

As Narayana makes his arrangement of passages from theKasikhan. d. a, moreover, he seems deliberately to emphasise the themeof ‘southern’-ness. The Mukti mandapam, associated with the kindsof study that Brahmans in particular undertake, is the ‘southern’mandapam, daks.inamand. ape, just as many of the Brahmans who nowdeliberated there were themselves ‘southerners’.79

There is also an important contemporary parallel. The Gajapati kingof Orissa, Prataparudra Deva, erected a Mukti mandapam during the

76 James Prinsep, Banaras Illustrated in a Series of Drawings (Calcutta: Baptist MissionPress, 1833), p. 68; Altekar, History of Benaras, p. 51.

77 Kasikhan. d. a, adhyaya 79, vss. 54–74; adhyaya 98, ‘Celebration of the entry ofVisvesvara into the Mukti mandapam’.

78 Narayan. abhat.t.aviracitah. Tristhalısetuh. , p. 189; Kasikhan. d. a, adhyaya 3, vs. 92.79 Narayan. abhat.t.aviracitah. Tristhalısetuh. , pp. 188–190. These passages from the

Tristhalısetu are taken from Kasikhan. d. a, adhyaya 79, vss 53–94. I am particularlygrateful to Vincenzo Vergiani and Jim Benson for their assistance with these sections.




1520s, building it on the south side of the main Jagannatha templeat Puri. It was both a pillared hall, and a ‘college’ of learned UtkalaBrahmans, who met regularly in the Mukti mandapam to adjudicatein matters of social and religious law.80 Narayana’s son, Samkara,attests that ‘the lord of Utkala’, or Orissa, invited Narayana to debatewith these eastern pandits. We cannot be certain that Narayana wasaware of these conventions, although it seems very possible that hewas, having spent a month in debate with them. We also cannot knowwhether other ‘southern’ pandits were aware of this Puri model whenthey consciously revived the old tradition of learned meetings in thatpart of the reconstructed Visvesvara temple, or whether indeed thePuri model was itself adopted from the Visvesvara temple. But it doesseem striking that when they issued their judgements, the Banaraspandits advertised themselves as meeting in the powerful spiritualcentre recently reconstructed by their own leading pandit, and in awell-known part of it associated both with ‘southern’-ness, and withlearned deliberations in matters of law.

The Nirn. ayapatra of 1583: Devarsis and Chipolanas

The first detailed record dates from 1583 and concerns the Devarukheor Devarsi Brahmans.81 This is an observer’s account of the assembly,written by one Ganesa Sastri Kozhrekar, a resident of Banaras,to ‘the heads of the Konkana Devarsi Brahmans’: GanesaprabhuBhudasavale, Haradeprabhu Tere, Visvanathaprabhu Chaphekar,Balaprabhu Khalagaonkar and Arekar Mahajan. Kozhrekar’s letterwas written in Marathi, but with greetings expressed in Sanskrit atthe start and at the end of the letter. Two ‘devarsi’ Brahmans, VitthalJyotisi and his son Krsna, had trained in Banaras as agnihotrıs, priestswhose task it was to maintain a perpetual sacrificial fire. Having

80 These Brahmans enjoyed specific local rights as village proprietors, in return fortheir services. G.N. Dash, ‘The Evolution of Priestly Power: the Suryavamsa Period’in Anncharlott Eschmann et al. (eds), The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition ofOrissa (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978), pp. 209–222; G. Pfeffer, ‘Puri’s Vedic Brahmans:Continuity and Change in their Traditional Institutions’, in Eschmann, Cult ofJagannath, pp. 421–438; and Chandrika Panigrahi, ‘Muktimandap Sabha of Brahmans,Puri’ in Nirmal Kumar Bose, Data on Caste in Orissa (Calcutta: Anthropological Surveyof India, 1960), pp. 179–192.

81 Ramakrsna Sadasiva Pimputkar, Cital.ebhat.t.a Prakaran. a (Bombay: Karnatak Press,1926), pp. 76–77.




learned their craft, they sought the agreement of Banaras’s wholeassembly of Brahmans, ‘samasta kasıkara brahmana’. Then ‘sacrificerViresvara Bhatta Abhyankar, Haribhatta Bhavye, GovindabhattaGodbole, and Kesavabhatta Abhyankar said, we are all agreed, andit should be known that you are made agnihotris by consent of thewhole Brahman community’.

Then Anantabhatta’s amatya, Govindabhatta Abhyankar, Dhonda the jyotisiand Ramakrsnabhatta Pauranik, of Anantabhatta’s party (paks.a), spoke.Janardhanbhatta Citale said that Anantabhatta wrote a letter of releaseat our house concerning the Devarsi Brahmans, and the letter was broughtfor the assembly to see.’82

The letter appears to be a kind of confession: ‘Anantabhatta wrotethat he had pursued hostilities (dvesa kela hota) against the DevarsiBrahmans, which was against the sastras. There is exchange of foodbetween us (tyasa amhasa annasam. bandha ahe).’ Having heard allthis, the assembly reaffirmed that Anantabhatta had been correct inhis confession.

It was determined that all this community of Brahmanas (he samastabrahmana), the Chiplunas, Devarsis and Maharastras, have the same vedickarmas (samana vaidika karmi) and that there is authority for sharing of foodtogether. It was also agreed that Brahmans should not conduct hostilities witheach other.

Kozhrekar described the pandits who had affirmed this decision.‘Ganesa Diksita Bhavye, head of the Chipolanas, KrsnabhattaBakhale, head of the Karhades’ represented the two leading Konkanicommunities. Others represented some of the five northern andfive southern divisions: ‘Sesa Krsnabhatta pandit, head of theMaharastras, Gopibhatta, head of the Gurjaras, Vidyanivasa, headof the Gaudas, Raghupati Upadhyaya, head of the Tailabhaktas’. Toreinforce its judgement, the assembly also invoked the authority ofVisvesvara. ‘He who says that there should not be exchange of food, lethim be brought to the place of Srivisvesvara.’ Thus was the judgementin the Mukti mandapam: ‘iti muktiman. dapama nirn. aya’. Kozhrekarended his letter with a report that a copper-plate enshrining this

82 An amatya is a minister or counsellor. ‘Letter of release’: the term used hereis ‘udvarapatra’, implying release, from a debt, for example, a social boycott or acurse.




decision was being despatched from Banaras and sending his greetingsto Krsnaji and Kanhoji Raja at their court in Srngarpur.83

The names listed as ‘heads of the Konkana Devarsi Brahmans’,to whom Kozhrekar addressed his letter, are all Devarukhe familynames.84 The hostilities he describes seem in outline at least to matchthe other histories of the quarrel between Devarukhes and a memberof the Citale family back in the Konkan. Now, however, the suggestionis that the rift has been carried with the Citale move from the Konkanto Banaras, to create a ‘party’ of Anantabhatta within the panditcommunity of the city.

The account makes it clear that Anantabhatta Citale was not himselfat the assembly, although his amatya or ‘minister’ was, indicatingthat Anantabhatta was a man of wealth and position. He is not theVasudeva Citale described as the original party to the dispute. Itmay be possible to identify Anantabhatta. One Anantabhatta Citalefrom the Konkan is referred to in the Bhatta family chronicle writtenby Samkara, the son of Ramesvara, first member of the family tomove to Banaras. Anantabhatta is described there as the first studentwhom Ramesvara took on after his arrival in Banaras around 1520.85

Anantabhatta also appears in a Bhatta family history written at the endof the nineteenth century, where he is described as having obtainedparticular proficiency in dharmasastra.86 If the Anantabhatta Citalementioned at the meeting had been a student in Banaras in the 1520sor 1530s, he would have been a very old man, or deceased, by thetime of the meeting in 1583, but it would be quite possible for theGovindabhatta Abhyankar named here as his minister or counsellor, tohave been at this assembly. If they were the same, Anantabhatta mayhave been a descendant of Vasudeva Citale, moving from the Konkanto Banaras in the second or third decades of the sixteenth century,and becoming an accomplished scholar in the rules of dharmasastra,

83 Kanhoji Raja presided over the 1600 judicial assembly that decided the disputebetween the Padhye and Purohita families over rights to local priestly offices: seebelow, fn 92.

84 See Pandit, Devarukhyam. vıs.ayım. Sastrasam. mata Vicara, pp. 35–38. We are not ableto identify this Kozhrekar. Abhyankar and Citale are both old Chitpavan familynames: Gunjikar, Sarasvatı Man. d. ala, p. 115.

85 Benson, ‘Sam. karabhat.t.a’s family chronicle’, p. 12. Anantabhatta Citale of theKonkan is listed in V. Raghavan et al., New Catalogus Catalogorum (Madras: Universityof Madras, 1949–2000), Vol. 1, p. 136. (Hereafter NCC.) No works have been traced.

86 S.S. Tripathi (ed.), Bhat.t.avam. sakavyam (Allahabad: Bhartiya Manisha Sutram,1983), p. 11. I am very grateful to James Benson for this reference.




even as he pursued the family animosity against the Devarsis of thecity.

Leading intellectuals from Banaras and beyond were present at theassembly. P.K. Gode has identified Bhavye Ganesh Diksita, ‘head ofthe Chipolanas’, as Bhava Ganesa Diksita the pupil of Vijnanabhiksu,the celebrated philosopher of Banaras.87 Sesa Krsnabhatta pandita,‘head of the Maharastras’, is the great grammarian of the Sesafamily noted above.88 Vidyanivasa, ‘head of the Gaudas’, is likelyto be the Vidyanivasa Bhattacaraya, leader of the Bengal panditswith whom Narayana Bhatta debated at the house of Todar Mal.89

Interestingly, Narayana Bhatta himself is not mentioned as beingpresent at the meeting: Sesa Krsna here is described as ‘head of theMaharastras’.

The Visvesvara temple and its Mukti mandapam, possibly newlyreconstructed around this time, appear together here as the sourceof a particular sacralised intellectual authority. Anyone who tried todefy it had to reckon not only with the authority of the assembly, butof Visvesvara, god of the temple, himself. The assembly also seemsdeliberately constituted as a kind of ‘panel’, in which subgroups ofBrahmans are represented by their heads or pramukha. Judgementsgiven in other assemblies also emphasised that Brahmans of everyregion were present, in a way that seems designed to enhance theirauthority.

What do we know about the form of these assemblies as corporateevents? There are certainly indications that their proceedingsincluded elaborate ceremonies of precedence. Later histories describeNarayana Bhatta and his family as being accorded the rights ofagrapuja, ‘the first place of honour in the assembly of learnedBrahmanas and at the recitations of the Vedas’.90 The Sesa familywere also reported to receive particular honours at every assemblythey attended, two sambhavanas or gifts and marks of honour being

87 P.K. Gode, ‘The Chronology of Vijnanabhiks.u and his Disciple Bhava Gan. esa,the Leader of the Citpavan Brahmins of Benares’, in Adyar Library Bulletin, Vol. viii,Pt 1, 17 February 1944, pp. 20–28. See also CC Vol. 1, p. 144.

88 Krsna Sesa: NCC, Vol. IV, pp. 364–366.89 For Vidyanivasa Bhattacarya see also Upadhyaya, Kası ki panditya parampara,

p. 30, and Shastri, A Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts, Vol. 6, ‘Vyakaran. a’,p. lxxxiii, and CC, Vol. 1, p. 574a.

90 P.V. Kane and SG Patwardhan, Vyavaharamayukha of Bhat.t.a Nılakan. t.ha (Pune: PVKane, 1926), p. vii; R.N. Dandekar (ed.) Sanskrit and Maharashtra (Pune: University ofPune, 1972), p. 31.




bestowed on them, as opposed to the single marks of honour given toeveryone else.91

How effective was this judgement back in the Konkan? The evidencesuggests that the local social hierarchies of the Konkan were not astractable as the pandit communities of Banaras might have hoped. Adispute some two decades later over rights to priestly office, heard atthe court of Kanhoji raja at Srngarpur in the Konkan in 1600, revealsthe Devarukhes still complaining that the local Karhade Brahmansrefused to take food at their houses.92

The letters of 1630 and 1631: Saraswats

In the spring of 1630, a Banaras pandit assembly met to considera complaint they had received from Brahmans of Mumbai.93 TheSanskrit letter of judgement, dated Vaisaka 1552, or April–May 1630,was addressed as follows: ‘To the Desastha, Citapavana, Karnata,Gurjara and others living in Mumbapuri, Dadambhatta Bhatta andothers from Kasi send their homage and greetings.’

You posed an objection that in your country the members of the Kusasthaliand Sasasti families are performing the six karmas. But it is impossible tosay that they are ineligible for the actions, since it is seen in the desa thatthey take sannyas, and everywhere they are seen performing the Srautaand Grhya Vedic rituals such as the Agnihotra. This much is heard from themouths of the learned. And what is more, Kamalakara Bhatta has establishedthe greatness of the fourth stage of life [sannyas] for these castes. They arepart of the gauda category of Brahmins, and to be honoured within their owncaste. And everyone has seen that document.

A successful community, then, in Mumbai (as we know the Saraswatsto have been), had attracted the hostility of other local Brahmans,protesting against the Saraswats’ insistence that they were entitled toperform all of the six karmas allowed to those of full Brahman status.94

91 Aryavaraguru, ‘On the Sheshas of Benaras’, p. 247.92 Potdar and Muzumdar, Sivacaritra Sahitya, Vol. 2, p. 341.93 D.V. Apte, ‘Sarasvatace Brahmanatva’, Bharata Itihasa Sam. sodhaka Man. d. ala

Quarterly, Vol. XV, no 4, March 1935, pp. 2–3.94 A ‘full’ Brahman was a s.at.karmı, entitled to perform the six karmas of adhyayana

and adhyapana, ie studying the Vedas for oneself and teaching them to others;yajana and yajana, ie conducting a sacrifice and procuring sacrifice through another;and dana and pratigraha, ie giving gifts and accepting gifts. A trikarmı Brahman wasentitled to do only the lesser three of these six, ie studying the Vedas for themselves,




But the Banaras assembly defended their claims. It did so both on theground of their observable customs, and from the fact that membersof their communities were known to become sannyasis or ascetics,the fourth and final stage of life traditionally assumed for Brahmans.Kamalakara Bhatta is said to have emphasized this as a significantmarker of Brahmanhood, and ‘everyone has seen that document’. It isnot clear which of Kamalakara’s works this is, but it is interesting thatit is said to have circulated so widely in this way. Nineteen signatureswere appended to the judgement.95

Bhatta Anantaramasarma, Bhattopakhyadadambhatta, Dharmadhikari-mahidharasarma, Sesopakhyavisvesvarasarma, Jadaypanamno Gangarama;Sesopakhyacakrapane, Punyasthambopakhyasomanathasarma, Gangarama-maitropanamaka, Devopakhyamahadevasarma, Staropakhyasakharama,Dasaputropakhyalaksmanapanta, Punyastambhopakhyavaijanatha, Paura-nikopakhyatmaramabhatta, Jyotirvidupanamakagurjarasiddevesvara, Kaka-ropakhyaganesasarma, Nagesasastri Andhrasya, Ganga Diksita Ayacitopana-maka, Babu Diksita Ayacita, Ramakrsna Agnihotri.

Represented are the Bhatta, Sesa, Dharmadhikari, Deva andPunatambe families.96 Visvesvara Sarma Sesa may be the ViresvaraSesa who was the son of Krsna Sesa: in south Indian texts, hisname is often written as Visvesvara.97 This would make him theteacher of some of Banaras’s most distinguished pandits of the firsthalf of the seventeenth century: Panditaraja Jagannatha, BhattojiDiksita and Annambhatta. It is possible that Cakrapani Sesa here isCakrapani Sesa, the son of Visvesvara Sesa, and author of the Parama-takhan. d. ana, written as a rebuttal to Bhattoji Diksita’s controversial

procuring sacrifice through others, and giving gifts. V.M. Apte, Social and Religious Lifein the Grhya Sutra (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1931), p. 11.

95 There are small variations in the Sanskrit prefixes and suffixes attached to eachsignature as it appears on the documents in the printed versions examined for thispaper: samatam; samati; patrartha samata; samatartha; asminartha samata; anumata. Thesetranslate variously as ‘agreed’, ‘agreed to the letter’, ‘in favour’ ‘content in the matter’,etc.

96 ‘Bhatta’ is both the family name of the Bhattas of Banaras, and an honorific titlegiven to a learned Brahman, usually attached to the given name as a suffix. ‘Diksita’may be an honorific, or description of a role, applied to a Brahman initiated as asacrificer or other ritual role. The same is true of ‘Pauranik’, ‘versed in the Puranas’,‘Jyotisi’, ‘astrologer’, ‘Agnihotri’, ‘keeper of the sacrificial fire’ and so on. As the useof family names became common from the late seventeenth century, some panditsadopted these occupational titles as family names. Others derived family names fromtheir places of origin, adding the distinctive Marathi suffix ‘-kar’. These overlapsfrequently make certain identification difficult.

97 Aryavaraguru, ‘On the Sheshas of Benaras’, p. 251.




Praud. ha-Manorama.98 ‘Nagesa Sastri of Andhra’ is clearly a ‘southerner’.Other names in this list are Maratha Brahman family names.99

Another pointer here to the Marathi language influence is theindicator used for the family name. Sometimes the Sanskrit upakhya,‘surname’, is used to indicate the family name, and sometimes theMarathi term upanama.

Just a year later, in 1631, Vitthal, a resident of Kusasthal, journeyedto Banaras to ask its pandit communities for help in reviving the town’sgreat mat.h, which had been destroyed by the Portugese in 1564.Bhavananda Saraswati, sixty-second guru of the mat.h, was living inBanaras in 1631. Vitthal wanted to assume the status of renouncer sothat he could take up the headship of the revived mat.h. The assemblyaddressed its judgement to the Brahmans of the Sahyadri region.100

In the city of Visvesvara, the whole community of the excellent Pancadravidas,that is to say, Dravidas, Andras, Karnatakas, Maharastras and Gurjaras,these who live in the seven cities, send greetings to the Pancadravidasand Pancagaudas who live in the region of the Sahyadri mountains of theDaksina Desa. Recently there came to Banaras a pilgrim, one Vitthal, son ofSyamaraja, from Kusasthal. He made a plea to our whole community that heshould be allowed the fourth stage of life.

The whole Dravida community had gathered ‘in the Muktimandapam of Srisvami’s temple’, and conducted a very thoroughinvestigation. There had been a difficulty, that these Brahmanscustomarily ate fish. But this was not an insuperable bar. In eatingfish, they were simply following the prescriptions of Parasurama, whoallowed all those who came to settle in the Konkan to follow their longestablished customs. The pandits thus determined that these pancagaud. as were fully Brahmans, entitled to all of the six karmas andhence able to assume the status of a sannyasi, or renouncer, requiredby headship of the mat.h. The path was thus cleared for Vitthal toassume the headship, under the new name of Sachchidanda Saraswati,his initiatory gurus being the previous head of the mat.h, BhavanandaSaraswati and Laksmana Bhatta.

Thirty-four names were appended to the judgement.

98 Cakrapani Sesa: NCC, Vol. VI, p. 283. A Cakrapani Pandita also contributed tothe Kavındracandrodaya: p. 10.

99 Ayacita and Jade are Karhade names. Dharmadhikari and Dasaputra areDesastha names; Pauranik may be Chitpavan or Desastha.

100 Gunjikar, Sarasvatı Man. d. ala, Appendix 2, pp. 22–24.




Bhavanandasarasvati, Kamalakarabhatta, Dharmadhikarirambhatta, Agni-hotri Raghunathabhatta, Haribhattadiksita, Purandararamacandrabhatta,Aradilaksmanabhatta, Kasipurivasipuranandasarasvati, Anandavana, Hari-harasrama, Aradopanamaka Narayanabhatta, Kolasekaropanamaka Maha-devabhatta, Bhavanandasarasvati, Raghunathabhattapandita, Narayan-bhattapandita, Muralidharajayakrsnabhatta, Radheyagopalabhatta,Mayapurvasino Badariyadamodarbhatta, Kedarbhattasunoramaheswara,Godavaritryambakavasino Ganesabhattakadamba, Anantadaivajnya, Hari-diksita, Ramacandrasastri, Tailanganavisvesvarasastri, Laksmana Bhatta,Ganesabhatta Somayaji, Kovaivasudevbhatta, Visvesvaradiksita, AgnihotriDinkarabhatta, Janardanbhatta, Ambikabhatta, Indoravasisesabhatta,Yogisvarajayarama, Raghunathakasinatha.

We can identify Bhavananda Saraswati, the head of the Kusasthalmat.h: there is a second Bhavananda Saraswati, whose identity isuncertain. Also at the head of the list is the great scholar Kamalakaraof the Bhatta family.101 Gode identifies Narayanbhatta Arade asNarayanbhatta Laksmidhara Arade, a Karhade Brahman from thesouthern Konkan and writer on dharmasastra topics.102 Anothermember of this family is also listed. Raghunathabhatta pandita maybe Raghunathabhatta, the grandson of Ramesvara Bhatta, the firstof the Bhatta family to settle in Banaras.103 Haridiksita may bethe grandson of the great grammarian Bhattoji Diksita.104 LaksmanaBhatta, recorded as the initiatory guru of Sachchidananda Saraswati,may be the Laksmana Bhatta who is the brother of KamalakaraBhatta, and author of works on dharmasastra.105 Kovai is a Karhadefamily name, but this Vasudevabhatta does not seem to have left anywritings.106 There are also members of the Sesa and Dharmadhikarifamilies here.107

The Mukti mandapam is the site for this deliberation. The assemblymakes sweeping claims for its broad representation, although most

101 Kamalakara Bhatta: NCC Vol. III, pp. 161–165.102 See P.K. Gode, ‘Some Karhad. e Brahmin Families at Benares Between AD 1550

and AD 1660’ in Studies in Indian Cultural History, Vol. III, pp. 33–6; and Gode, ‘SomeAuthors of the Ard. e Family and their Chronology between AD 1600 and 1825’, inJournal of the Bombay University, September 1943, Vol. XII, Pt 2, pp. 63–69; and S.L.Katre, ‘Narayanabhat.t.a Ard. e, His Works and Date’, in Bharatıya Vidya, March-April1945, pp. 74–86.

103 Raghunatha Bhatta: CC Vol. 1, p. 484a. His dates are usually given as c. 1545–1625, making this identification a possibility only.

104 Haridiksita: CC Vol. 1, pp. 756a-b.105 Laksmana Bhatta: CC Vol. 1, p. 537a.106 Gode, ‘Some Karhad. e Brahmin Families’.107 Dharmadhikari and Purandare here are Desastha names.




of the names are in fact of Maratha Brahmans. Both lettersof decision return favourable verdicts on the entitlements of theSaraswats, brushing aside the objections of other local Brahmans. Theyemphasize the significance of current and widely observed practiceas determining entitlement, and the importance of widely acceptedauthorities like Kamalakara Bhatta. There is not much overlap withthe previous list, indicating a rapid turnover in their membership.108

Some of the pandits here indicate a residence elsewhere, although asindicated above, stays in Banaras could extend over many years.

‘Pandits of Kings and Kingdoms’: Belgaum, 1656–1658

Were disputes about the entitlements of other caste communitiesreferred to Banaras in the same way? A disagreement between theJain and Lingayat communities of Athani in Belgaum, recorded inthe family papers of the Shetti family of the town, provides aninteresting comparison. At issue was the question of whether theJains, like the Lingayats, had a right to bring their spiritual leaders inprocession through the town. In a letter of 29 October 1656, AbdulAli, the havaldar of Athani, wrote to the faujdar of Banaras. His lettercontained the depositions of both parties, both requesting that thematter be sent for a decision to Banaras, where there were ‘greatpeople learned in all the four Vedas and hundred sastras, learned inlogic, people who are the pandits of kings and kingdoms’, ‘rajya rajyacepan. dita’. Abdul Ali concluded his letter with a request to the faujdar‘to call together the great pandits who are learned in the sastras, tellthem the narrative of the case, get a decision based on the vedas andsastras from this Brahma sabha of pandits learned in the Vedas andsastras, write down the reply accordingly, and send it’.109

But if the people of Athani hoped for an unambiguous verdict, theywere to be disappointed. A further meeting in the town, of 3 December1658, recorded that the leaders of the Lingayat community had beento Banaras, had managed to get a jayapatra, or ‘letter of victory’, andhad brought it back to Athani to present before the senior officialsof the town. But, perplexingly, ‘after five months, the Jaina gurus

1081630 to 1632 were years of exceptionally severe famine in Maharashtra, which

may account for shifts in the Maratha population of Banaras. See A.R. Kulkarni,Maharashtra in the Age of Shivaji (Pune: Deshmukh and Co., 1969), pp. 94–104.

109 Potdar and Muzumdar, Sivacaritra Sahitya, Vol. 2, pp. 354–355.




and Jaina people went and brought back their own jayapatra’. Withinthe space of five months, each party had been to Banaras, and eachhad returned with an authoritative letter favourable to itself. Withmatters brought thus to an impasse, the officials of the town decidedto resolve the contest themselves. A further meeting was held on 30thDecember 1658, at which both parties presented their cases. Themeeting decided in favour of the Lingayats: ‘the guru of the Lingayatsmay go in procession, and the guru of the Jainas may not’. A mazharwas issued to this effect.110

We do not have the names of the Banaras pandits who issued thesedecisions. Nor do we know whether the parties presented their case tothe same pandit assemblies or sought out different ones, likely to bemore favourable to their individual cases. At issue was a disagreementabout entitlement to ritual display—clearly important to the prestigeand identity of each of the two contending parties. We do not have thegrounds of the argument for the Athani case, but it may be significantthat the Banaras pandits consulted returned favourable verdicts toboth of the contending parties in quick succession. As in the casesexamined above, this might have stemmed from a reluctance to openup divisions among the greater community of Brahmans. The case alsosuggests the reputation Banaras had in the mid-seventeenth centuryfor learning in matters of dharmic dispute, even for the Muslimhavildar of a south Indian town. There is a significant contemporaryring to this, an allusion to the close associations between the Banaraspandits of this period and their royal and imperial patrons: these arenot just learned pandits, but ‘pandits of kings and kingdoms’.

Devarukhes, 1657

Around 1657 the pandits of Banaras were again being consulted aboutthe Devarsis/Devarukhes. It seems to have been the largest assemblyyet, and the stakes particularly high. It produced just a short letter ofdecision.111

Victory to Visvesvara. So now, at the Mukti mandapam in Kasi, the questionof the status as real Brahmins of the Devarsi Brahmins is decided, by themixed company of learned Brahmins and ascetics. With respect to this point,

110 Ibid., pp. 357–358. A mazhar is a letter of decision from a majlis or assembly ofsenior officials convened to hear disputes: see fn. 55 above.

111 Pimputkar, Cital.ebhat.t.a Prakaran. a, pp. 78–81.




having reflected on what the Vedas, the Sastras, and worldly evidence provide,by agreement among the whole collection of householders of all the familiesand castes of Maharastra, Karnataka, the Konkan, the Tailanga region, andof the Dravida and other places, and also of the collection of sannyasis whoare of the high degree of Paramahamsa, and possessed of adorable feet, thetruth about the Devarsi Brahmans is learned from the Vedas, Sastras andPuranas. They are of the nature that they can perform Vedic sacrifices ontheir own behalf and on behalf of others, they purify the line in which theydine, they are worthy people as family relations, and are of the nature ofbeing absolutely excellent Brahmins. And it is decided that the communityof people who set the standard for what is dharmic do have family relationswith them. And this was seen by Raghunatha Bhatta, a Bhatta mımam. saka.The daughter of Anantabhatta Manikarni, was made the wife of a Vajapeya,having been married to a Devarsi.

And we ourselves among many others belong to that vamsa, who are ofthat sort. Anyone who speaks against this decision, reached by the wise, isa desecrator of the god Visvanath and a murderer of Brahmins. This is thedecision.

This was written by Bhatta Laksmana, the mımam. saka. It was written withthe permission of the learned. This was done in the Samvat year 1714 andthe Saka year 1579.

In the most forceful manner, then, the assembly invokes Visvesvara’sdivine power in support of its learned pronouncements. The judgementis particularly interesting for the evidence it offers in support ofthe contention that the Devarsis were unimpeachable Brahmans.Raghunatha Bhatta, ‘the mımam. saka’, had been satisfied that theywere equal. There is no Raghunatha Bhatta amongst the signatoriesto the letter. The reference therefore is to some past expressionof approval. It is possible therefore that this is the RaghunathaBhatta, grandson of Ramakrsna, who (as already noted) may havesigned the 1631 decision on Saraswats above, but was now deceased.In addition, the assembly declared, Anantabhatta Manikarni hadgiven his daughter into a Devarsi family. We cannot identify thisAnantabhatta: ‘Manikarni’ suggests a possible connection with theManikarnika ghat, cosmic centre of Banaras.112 The context, however,suggests that Anantabhatta was a local Brahman of good repute, whose

112 The Kasikhan. d. a describes the Manikarnika ghat as the place where Visnuperformed the austeries that brought the universe into being at the beginning oftime, and where Siva, trembling with delight at the sight, dropped his ear-ring,man. ikarn. ı, into Visnu’s tank. Visnu asked for a boon: since Siva’s earring was set withpearls, mukta, this sacred place should thenceforth confer mukti on souls. Parry, Deathin Banaras, pp. 11–15.




willingness to marry his daughter to a Devarsi put the respectablestanding of that community beyond doubt. As if further to affirm thisstanding, it was recorded that the Devarsi was a sacrificer, and thattoo of the rare and difficult vajapeya sacrifice.113

The seventy-seven signatories were in the main Brahmans from theMarathi-speaking regions, but with a significant addition of panditsfrom Bengal or south India. ‘Bhatta Laksmana, the mımam. saka’, whois recorded as having written out the document, may be a member ofthe Bhatta family.114

Puranendrasaraswati, Vyasendra, Bhatta Nilakantha, CakrapanipanditSesa, Auba Sukla, Kalopanamagovindabhatta, Bapuvyasa, Maunigop-ibhatta, Raghudevabhattacarya, Dasaputragovindabhatta, Vinayakasukla,Tenkalopakhyabapubhatta, Vidvasopakhyabahiravabhatta, Ganesadiksita,Dataravisvanatha, Kovaivasudeva, Narayanabhatta Arde, Gadvaranarasim-habhatta, Payasopakhyanarasimhabhatta, Vaderutamabhatta, Kunda-lighaubhatta, yati Narasimhasrama known as Brahmendrasaraswati,Anantadeva, Gagabhatta, Samrajayapandita, Bhayabhatta, Govindabhat-tacarya, Balakrsnadiksita, Suklopakhyavireswara, Koradeharisamkara,Tulasidevabhatta, Chandibhairava, Manoharavisvanatha, Appayadiksita,Ramhradasthadhundiraja, Bhaskarajyotirvida, Mahasabdopakhyajyotirvida,Nagarkarakrsnabhatta, Vaisapayanagiridharabhatta, Kharopanamakganes-abhatta, Gautamrambhatta, Cintamanibhattadrona, Kavimandanabal-akrsnabhatta, Kalabandevisvesvarabhatta, Patankaravisnudiksita, Sivara-matirtha and Narayanatirtha, Khandadeva, Bhattanantamimamsaka,Laksmanapanditavaidya, Caitanyamadhavadeva, Ramaramabhattacarya,Ramhradayasyagomajibhata, Dauganesadiksita and Bapudiksita, Pal-setkarajyotirvinnarayana, DabholkarajyotirvidaVitthala, Bhaverudradiksita,Kasisomayaji and Laksmanasomayaji, Mahasabdedevabhatta, Ghumarema-hadevabhatta, Polakasibhatta, Sachchidandasarasavati, Tilbhandesvara,Maunivisnudiksita, Naraharidiksita and Visnudiksita, Laksmanadiksita,Dinadiksita and Namudikshitasya, Vacchabhatta, Pauranikagadadhara, Ja-yaramanyayapancana, Bharadavajamahadeva, Sathe Upanamakmahadeva,Pote Mahadevabhatta.115

Puranendrasaraswati is likely to be the Puranendrasaraswati who ismentioned as a leading sannyasi of Banaras in the praise addresses of

113 The Vajapeya is the most important of the public sacrifices in which soma juiceand animals are offered as oblations to the gods. For sacrifice in the lives of Banaraspandits, see Jan E.M. Houben, ‘The Brahman Intellectual: History, Ritual and “Timeout of Time”’, in Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 30, 5, October 2002, pp. 463–479.

114 But too young to have been the Laksmana Bhatta, brother of KamalakaraBhatta, who may have signed the 1631 letter. His dates are usually given as 1585–1630.

115 Some names occur here as pairs, suggesting a family or tutelary relationship.




the Kavındracandrodaya.116 Bhatta Nilakantha is probably the youngestson of the mımam. saka Samkara Bhatta.117 Cakrapanipandit Sesa maybe the same as signed the 1631 letter, by now advanced in years. AVasudeva Kovai was at the 1631 meeting: it is possible that thismay be the same person, along with the same Narayanbhatta Arde,also at the 1631 meeting. Gode suggests that ‘Yati Narasimhasramaknown as Brahmendrasarasavati’ is the Brahmendrasvami whoappears alongside Puranendrasarasvati as another eminent sannyasiof Banaras, in the Kavındracandrodaya.118 Anantadeva we may identifyas the famous member of the Deva family and author of the greatcompendium of the Smr.tikaustubha.119 Gagabhatta is the famous scionof the Bhatta family.120 One Bhayabhatta also presented a praiseaddress.121 Appaya Diksita here is likely to be Appaya Diksita III,grandson of the great philosopher and defender of Saiva HinduismAppaya Diksita.122 Two members of the Mahasabde family appear onthis list: Mahasabdejyotirvida, and Mahasabdedevabhatta, the latterof whom P.K. Gode has identified as Devabhatta Mahasabde, father ofRatnakarabhatta, guru of Savai Jaisingh of Amber.123 The Mahasabdeswere Desastha Brahmans from Maharashtra, who had migrated toBanaras early in the seventeenth century. P.K. Gode here identifiesNarayanatirtha as the author of Bhasaprakasika composed at Banaras,and the guru of Nilakantha Chaturdhara in mımam. sa. He appearshere with his guru Sivaramatirtha.124

The Khandadeva is likely to be Khandadeva Misra, the greatmımam. saka and intellectual innovator from Bengal.125 Anantabhatta

116 Sharma and Patkar, Kavındracandrodaya, pp. 24–25.117 Nilakantha Bhatta: NCC Vol. 10, pp. 174–175.118 Brahmanendrasarasavati: CC Vol. 1, p. 389a; Sharma and Patkar,

Kavındracandrodaya, p. 29, and P.K. Gode, ‘The Identification of GosvamiNr.simhasrama of Dara Shukoh’s Sanskrit Letter with Brahmendra Sarasvatı of theKavındracandrodaya’, in Studies in Indian Literary History, Vol. II, pp. 447–451.

119 Anantadeva, fl. 1645–75: NCC Vol. 1, p. 127.120 Gagabhatta: CC Vol. 1, pp. 587b–588a.121 Sharma and Patkar, Kavındracandrodaya, p. 9, identify this Bhayyabhatta as the

son of Bhattaraka Bhatta and author of Dharmaratna: CC Vol. 1, p. 416b.122 Appayadiksita III: NCC Vol. 1, p. 200.123 P.K. Gode, ‘Some New Evidence Regarding Devabhat.t.a Mahasabde, the father

of Ratnakarabhat.t.a, the Guru of Sevai Jaising of Amber, (AD 1699–1743)’, in PoonaOrientalist, Vol. VIII, 3–4, 1943–1944, p. 132.

124 Ibid., p. 137.125 Khandadeva: NCC Vol. V, 173–4; Upadhyaya, Kası ki panditya parampara, pp.

31–35; P.K. Gode, ‘Chronology of the Works of Khand. adeva’, in Bimala Churn Law(ed.), D.R. Bhandarkar Felicitation Volume (Calcutta: Indian Research Institute, 1940),pp. 10–16; McRea, ‘Novelty of Form’.




‘the mımam. saka’ may possibly be the son of Kamalakara Bhatta,but it is difficult to be certain.126 Narayana Jyotira Palsetkar maypossibly be a descendant of the family of Chitpavan astrologersfrom Palshet in the Konkan described above. It is possible thatSachchidananda Saraswati is the guru of the Goa mat.h, installed in1631. There is a Tilbhandesvara who presents a praise address inthe Kavındracandrodaya.127 Jayarama Nyayapancanana is probably theleading scholar of nyaya from Bengal of the same name, whose praiseaddress appears in the Kavındracandrodaya.128 Bharadavajamahadevamay be the Mahadeva Bharadavaja who was the son-in-law ofNilakantha Bhatta, and founder of the Bharadavaja family inBanaras.129 There are many other Maharashtrian Brahman familynames here.130

It is not clear what fresh incident prompted a further declarationabout the good standing of the Devarsis, and the extraordinaryassembly of Brahman intellectuals who met to affirm it. That amarriage between a Devarsi and another Banaras Brahman familyshould be referred to is not altogether surprising. Other examplesof marriage between Desasthas and other Maharashtrian Brahmansubcastes are mentioned in this period as well as in the nineteenthcentury.131 As noted above, the boundaries between these Brahmansubcastes were mutable. Also, it is no surprise that the small numbersof ‘Devarsis’ who had come up to Banaras might have been ableto maintain their reputations as social equals, at least in the shortterm. The meeting of 1583 produced a judgement emphasizing theimportance of consensus between the city’s Brahman communities, anemphasis that runs through all the judgements examined here whichcame out of Banaras. In addition, the Devarsis themselves seem tohave had some tradition of excellence as ritual specialists, which mayhave added to their reputation as worthy Brahmans and marriagepartners.132

126 The NCC lists several possible identifications: NCC Vol. 1, pp. 134–135.127 For Tilbandesvara, see Sharma and Patkar, Kavındracandrodaya, p. 29.128 Sharma and Patkar, Kavındracandrodaya, p. 6. NCC Vol. VII, pp. 188–190.129 Shastri, ‘Dakshini Pandits’, p. 13.130 Shukla, Dasaputra, Kavimandan, Pole, are Desastha names. Datar, Nagarkar,

Khare, Patankar, Dabholkar, Bhave, Pole, are Chitpavan names. Kale can beDesastha, Chitpavan or Karhade. Pauranik can be Desastha or Karhade.

131 For a marriage between a Desastha and a Karhade in this period, see Gode,‘Identification of Raghunatha’, pp. 414–415.

132 One of the most esteemed forms of marriage, according to Manu, was the ‘daiva’form, in which a daughter is given to a priest who officiates at a sacrifice, during thecourse of its performance. Trautmann, Dravidian kinship, p. 289.




As suggested above, however, this was a period in whichBrahmans back in the Maratha regions were becoming increasinglydifferentiated from one another in the rural social order. TheSaraswats’ ability to take advantage of these changes had producedone kind of pressure on the Banaras pandit communities, when otherMumbai Brahmans petitioned them to rule against the Saraswats’ritual claims. In the case of the Devarsis, it is not clear whetherBrahmans back in the Konkan had disputed their position, or whetherthe challenge had come from a faction in Banaras itself. But it seemsto have struck the ‘southern’ pandit communities of the city muchcloser to home. It impelled them to defend the Devarsis, with muchmore personal assertions of the social connections of many respectablefamilies in the city with them, in a manner that seems at onceaggressive and defensive. The stakes may have been particularly highbecause Banaras pandit families’ intellectual production, and theirreputations, were closely allied to the family setting of pandit housesthemselves.133

Shifting horizons in the 1660s

Political developments during the 1660s revealed the increasinginterlocking of events, not only in Banaras and the Maratha regions,but also in Delhi. In this same year of 1657, having consolidatedhis lands in the Bijapur territories, Sivaji staged his first directassault on the Mughal imperial forces. In 1658, the emperor ShahJahan was deposed. In 1659 Dara Shukoh, who had done muchto promote intellectual exchange between the learned of differentreligious traditions in the imperial capital, and who had his own closeconnections with the pandit communities of Banaras, was executed.134

By 1669, the Visvesvara temple and its Mukti mandapam had beendestroyed, and ‘Aurangzeb’s’ mosque constructed on the site.

As is well known, the rationales for these actions are difficult tointerpret. It is worth noting, though, that the destruction of the

133 It may also be significant that many of the ‘southern’ pandits interestedthemselves in the theories governing the lineage affiliations of gotra and pravara.Within the Bhatta family alone, Narayana, Raghunatha, Kamalakara and LaksmanaBhatta all wrote independent treatises on the subject.

134 Bernier, Travels, p. 345; PK Gode, ‘Samudra-Sangama, a Philosophical Work byDara Shukoh, Son of Shah Jahan Composed in AD 1655’, in Bharata Itihasa Sam. sodhakaMan. d. ala Quarterly,Vol. 94, October 1943, pp. 75–88.




Visvesvara temple does not follow the pattern that many historianshave observed for temple destruction in this period.135 It did not takeplace on a moving military frontier, and it was not a political moveaimed at the authority of a refractory royal opponent, because Banaraswas not itself a royal city. As Eaton observed, the background to thedestruction of the Visvesvara temple lay in reports to Aurangzeb’scourt of undesirable educational activities in the schools and places ofworship of the city: some ‘deviant’ Brahmans in ‘established schools’in Banaras were attracting students from far and wide with their falseteachings.136 Further research may help us to understand what thesereported activities were, and whether they were connected in anyway either with Dara’s former networks of patronage and intellectualexchange in the city, or with the activities of the southern pandits atthe Visvesvara temple discussed in this paper.

It is equally difficult to determine the response of the Banaras panditcommunities to these events. Events back in the Konkan between 1664

and 1674 may furnish some clues. 1664 saw yet more calls to Banarasfrom disgruntled Brahmans in the Konkan in the matter of Saraswatentitlements, and a further assembly convened to consider the matter.The document recording this assembly tells us that a similar requestcame from Sivaji himself, now holding most of the territory of theKonkan, and exercising his kingly function of keeping the orders oflocal castes in their place.137 The response of the Banaras pandits onthis occasion was to hold their assembly at Rajapur in the heart ofSivaji’s new territory in the Konkan. Gagabhatta, Anantadeva andMahadeva Sesa attended, along with luminaries of Sivaji’s court andinfluential local families.138

We do not know what impelled the pandits to come to the Konkan,nor do we know what hopes they might have vested in Sivaji asa protector of dharma and of pious Brahmans. It may not be a

135 Richard M. Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States’ in DavidGilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (eds.) Beyond Turk and Hindu: rethinking religiousidentities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), pp.8–9, 254–260.

136 Eaton, ‘Temple Desecration’, 265–266.137 This judgement is in the Syenavıjatidharmanirn. aya, Bharata Itihasa Sam. sodhaka

Man. d. ala Varsika Itivrtta (Pune: BISM, 1914), pp. 296–305. See also O’Hanlon andMinkowski, ‘What makes people who they are?’, pp. 393–397.

138 Perhaps more exposed to the pressures of provincial opinion, the 1664

dharmasabha took a much harder line on the rights of the Senavis: they were onlytrikarmı Brahmans, because they had spent so much time as traders and farmers thattheir dharmic entitlement had changed: see Syenavıjatidharmanirn. aya, p. 300.




coincidence, though, that some of them seem to have moved swiftlyto forge links with the new Maratha court in the Konkan. It isnoteworthy in this regard that the letter of decision issued by theassembly included an effusive praise poem to Sivaji. We have yet tofind recorded responses to the destruction of the Visvesvara temple.These may, however, have been some of the factors that helped tobring about Gagabhatta’s consecration in 1674 of Sivaji as a dharmicking.139

Banaras Brahmans continued to attract appeals for adjudicationfrom the Maratha regions. The great assembly of 1657 provided nofinal resolution to the entitlements of the Devarukhes. On 7th October1683, one Hari Diksita wrote from Banaras to his relative, NarayanaDiksita, evidently back in the Konkan, to report that he had takenNarayana’s order to Banaras.140

Having arrived in Banaras, the Brahman pandits and Vaidikas who are atodds with us came to speak to me, along with your son in law, Govinda DiksitaChowdhuri. They said that if we wanted to break the rivalry and the hatredbetween us, we should give a feast for one or two hundred Brahmans, andthat would end the feud.

The feast had duly been given, and Hari reported that ‘all ofthe Maharashtra Brahmans as listed below came to the feast’. Onehundred and seven names were listed, many of them family namesthat appeared on earlier lists. The point of the feast, of course, was todeliver a judgement through the occasion itself of sharing food.

Here again was an initiative from the provinces: Narayana Diksita,evidently a leading Devarukhe from the Konkan, had commissioneda caste-fellow Hari Diksita to go to Banaras to negotiate with‘the Brahman pandits and Vaidikas who are at odds with us’. Afamily relative already in Banaras came along as an intermediary:Govinda Diksita Chowdhuri, son-in-law of Narayana. Interestingly,P.K. Gode identifies this Govinda Diksita Chowdhuri with the GovindaDiksita Chowdhuri who was the son of Nilakantha Caturdhara, thefamous commentator on the Mahabharata living at that time inBanaras.141 If this was the case, we would have here another example

139 See V.S. Bendrey, Coronation of Sivaji the Great (Bombay: PPH Bookstall, 1960).140 Pimputkar, Cital.ebhat.t.a Prakaran. a, pp. 82–84.141 Gode cites Nilakantha’s family genealogies, documentation of inam land

awarded to the family and Aufrecht’s identification of Govinda Diksita as belongingto the Caturdhara family. Gode, ‘Nılakan. t.ha Caturdhara’, pp. 485–486. However,the identification remains very much to be confirmed.




of marriage connections between the Devarukhes/Devarsis and herethe Desastha family of Nilakantha Caturdhara. If Devarukhes fromthe Konkan were sending representatives to Banaras to negotiate withits predominantly Desastha pandits, it would also have made perfectsense for them to bring in as an intermediary a local Desashta ofinfluence connected to the Devarukhes through marriage.

It is difficult to know what the Banaras pandits made of it when,pressed by Brahmans back in the Maratha regions, their verdictsseemed to be called into question with every passing generation.Perhaps some at least were perfectly well aware that as localcircumstances changed and new pressures and challenges developed,so the same issues would eventually come back, in rather the sameway that local rights of other kinds in this period needed fresh defenceand certification with every change of local power-holder. Very muchin line with Madhav Deshpande’s insights, it was always under localand particular conditions that historical agents sought to give socialform to their reading of ‘universal’ dharma.142

Conclusion

By 1683, Sivaji was already dead. In subsequent decades, the Marathapolity fragmented under the pressures of Mughal invasion and civilwar. By the time the political situation stabilized in the 1720s, aneffective network of functioning Maratha courts had developed inSatara, Kolhapur, Tanjore, and in Pune—the administrative andbanking centre of the new Maratha state under the new leadershipof the Chitpavan Bhatta family. A new constellation of judicialauthorities was emerging. The Pune court increasingly took over theburden of trying to inculcate unity amongst Maharashtrian Brahmans,and under the leadership of Ramasastri Prabhune developed its ownsophisticated judicial apparatus.143 In Banaras itself, there was anew kind of Maratha presence, now characterized by lavish buildingprojects and direct charitable grants to Brahmans.144

142 Deshpande, ‘Localising the Universal Dharma’ (unpublished mss).143 For Prabhune’s letters describing his judicial role, see Sadisiva Athavale,

Ramasastri Prabhun. e, (Pune: Srividya Prakasana, 1988). For the peshwa regime’sattempts to foster Brahman community, see O’Hanlon and Minkowski, ‘What makespeople who they are?’, pp. 410–12.

144 Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1993), p. 146.




In 1723, the Devarukhes again pressed their claim, not toBanaras, but to the chief pandit at the Satara court.145 Duringthe middle decades of the eighteenth century, there also appearsto have been a rising role in religious adjudication for theSankaracaryas of the Deccan’s religious mat.hs, and indeed a strugglefor ascendancy between them and the regional networks of Brahmandharmasabhas.146 Banaras pandits came again to the Maratha countryin 1749, when a party came down to the Satara court, along with acontingent from the Srngeri mat.h, to consider the entitlements ofthe Kayastha Prabhus.147 Banaras of course continued to enjoy itsreputation as a place of piety and intellectual charisma. But therewas a sense by this time that other centres of judicial authority wereoffering themselves for the resolution of fundamental questions ofBrahman entitlement, and now with the local reach to enforce theirdecisions.148

These long term social changes in the Maratha regions, and theireffects upon ‘southern’ pandits in Banaras, do not help, in anystraightforward way, to make sense of the intellectual changes ofthe period. Both the remarkable efflorescence of Sanskrit learningin the city in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the declinein intellectual production that historians have noted from the late-eighteenth century, call for the kind of nuanced intellectual history inwhich scholars of the period are already engaged. In this task, however,it may be helpful at least to get some sense of the degree to whichpandits in Banaras were exposed to the distinctive social changes that‘early modernity’ brought to the local societies of western and centralIndia, and had to grapple with the consequences for social relations inthe city. In a fundamental way, these changes opened up the questionof what it meant to be a Brahman, of the means by which practices ofcollective decision-making could be developed to project and sanctifythe authority of ‘southern’ Brahmans to wider Indian audiences, and

145 Pimputkar, Cital.ebhat.t.a Prakaran. a, pp. 85–89.146 O’Hanlon, ‘Narratives of Penance and Purification’, pp. 65–7; Bhat, ‘Acara,

vyavahara, prayascitta’, pp. 91–105.147 V.S. Bendrey, Maharas.t.retihasaci Sadhanem. (Bombay: Mumbai Marathi Gran-

thasangrahalaya, 1966), Vol. II, p. 491.148 For the processes of regionalization and vernacularisation in the Maratha

regions, see Sumit Guha, ‘Transitions and Translations: Regional Power andVernacular identity in the Dakhan, c. 1500–1800’, in Comparative Studies of SouthAsia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 24, 2, 2004, pp. 23–31, and Eaton, A Social Historyof the Deccan, pp. 41–54.




what Brahman community could signify amid the social turbulence ofthe age.

Note on sources

Many of the documents cited in this paper have come down to us incaste histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,or in other published collections of source materials for the Marathaperiod. It has not been possible in most cases to examine manuscriptcopies of the originals. But in many places it has been possible toprovide additional corroboration for these documents from othercontemporary sources; in others, it has been necessary to rely oninternal evidence within the documents themselves.

Material on the Saraswats is drawn principally from thedocuments published with Gunjikar’s Sarasvatı Man. d. ala, publishedin 1884. Interestingly, this collection does not include theSyenavıjatidharmanirn. aya, whose verdict was unfavourable to theSaraswats: this document was published by the Bharata ItihasaSamshodhaka Mandala in 1914.

Material on the Devarukhes is drawn from the collection ofdocuments originally published by R.S. Pimputkar in 1926 asCital.ebhat.t.a Prakarana.149 Pimputkar was himself a Devarukhe, workingas a Pune schoolteacher and involved in nationalist activity in the city.He met Lokamanya Tilak at the 1907 Surat meeting of the IndianNational Congress.150 Tilak mentions Pimputkar as one of a smallgroup of assistants who helped him to prepare his Gıta Rahasya forthe press.151 The materials were not Pimputkar’s own, but were madeavailable to him by another member of the Devarukhe community,Bhikaji Moresvar Manduskar.152 The occasion for their publicationlay in the preparation during the early 1920s of the Maharas.t.riyaDnyanakosa, the multivolume Marathi encyclopaedia edited by S.V.Ketkar. Manduskar made the letters available to Ketkar in the hope

149 These documents have been reprinted in C.Y. Mule et al., (eds), Devarukhe(Bombay: Ramesh Visnu Nimbkar, 1973), pp. 87–107.

150 Madhav Bhole and Chandrakant Laksman Pimputkar, personal communication.151 B.G. Tilak, Srimadbhagavadgita-Rahasya (Pune: Kesari Office, 1936), Vol. 1, pp.

55–56.152 Manduskar has described how he found these materials in the possession of

two Devarukhe families, the Khapadekars and Karulkars, in the Konkan village ofDahivali. Manduskar, Devarukhe dnyati itihasa sam. sodhan, mss, ff. 7v-8.




that he would use them in preparing the entry for the Devarukhes.Ketkar mentions seeing Manduskar’s letters, and acknowledgesManduskar’s help in preparing the Devarukhe entry: ‘We saw copiesof letters from authorities and dharmasabhas in various differentplaces, to the effect that they [the Devarukhes] are not excluded fromdining [with other Brahmans]’.153 In the event, however, Ketkar’sencyclopaedia referred only to a letter from 1723 citing puranic verseswhich asserted that ‘Devarastriyas’ were unfit to dine with otherBrahmans, and identifying the Devarukhes with this community.154

This prompted Manduskar and Pimputkar to publish the documentsindependently in 1926.

The possibility cannot be excluded that the letters are modernconstructions, prepared with the purpose of improving theDevarukhes’ image in Ketkar’s encyclopaedia. However, the lettersand the lists of names attached to them, contain a mass of internalevidence consistent with their production in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries. Some of the events discussed in the lettersare also alluded to in other and independent sources. In addition,the letters were extensively used by P.K. Gode, the historian andlongstanding curator of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institutein Pune, during the 1930s and 1940s. The letters were also citedby editors of the Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series, who used the panditsignatures as a way of assigning dates to particular pandits, and byother Indian scholars of the inter-war period.155 Because the letterswere published in Marathi caste histories, and the earliest of themis in Marathi rather than in Sanskrit, they have not to date beenextensively used by modern Sanskrit scholars.156

153 S.V. Ketkar, Maharas.t.riya Dnyanakosa (Pune: Maharas.t.riya Dnyanakosa Mandala,1925), Vol. 15, p. 155.

154 V.K. Rajwade developed this theme in a separate Marathi article published in1914, ‘The origin of the Devarukhes’, published in the annual special issue of theBharata Itihasa Sam. sodhaka Man. d. ala Quarterly. See Rajwade, ‘Devarukyaci Mulotpatti’,pp. 186–94.

155 Pandit Surya Narayana Sukla, Bhat.t.a Cintaman. i (Banaras: Chowkhamba SanskritSeries, 1933), pp. 1–2; Cinnasvami Sastri, Mımam. sakaustubha (Banaras: ChowkhambaSanskrit Series, 1933), pp. 2–3; Dineshchandra Bhattacharyya, ‘Sanskrit Scholars ofAkbar’s Time’, in Indian Historical Quarterly, Vol. XIII, 1937, p. 35.

156 But see Deshpande, ‘Localising the Universal Dharma’, and Pollock, ‘NewIntellectuals’, p. 20.


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